I have StarSan, but want something that will deliver a greater degree of brutal violence against bacteria in my buckets and bottles. What is a good measure of fresh chlorine bleach in five gallons of water that’s been filtered through an on-faucet filter, like a PUR filter? I’m wanting to go this way because StarSan is expensive and I have to drive an 80-mile round trip to get it. I can see a two-minute dunk in StarSan after a soaking in the bleach solution. Thanks!
I’d use Iodophors before bleach. Iodine is a stone cold killer and doesn’t come with the baggage of bleach.
This won’t be popular here, but away we go.
I now use bleach to kill the ookies in my 22 oz glass bottles,
after soaking in Oxygen brewery wash. I use a small medical
syringe (no needle) to squirt a tiny bit in each bottle, fill with water,
let sit over night, dump then rinse.
Don’t use bleach on metal. Occasionally I use bleach on my
Speidel HDPE fermenters. It whitens the fermenters which
overtime get tinted brown.
I forget offhand what the water/bleach ratio is for food service no rinse level.
You can search online for that, I use it sparingly often half of that.
The downside is I wear nitrile gloves, and even a spec on your clothes or
elsewhere your cooked. Although specs of Iodophor is no bargain either.
Years ago I had specs on the inside of the brown glass bottles, seen when held
up to the light. There is a thread here about my plight, can’t find it.
Tried everything, bleach was the only thing that worked.
Cheers
I use bleach for cleaning bottles. This idea came from Papazian - he advises 2 ounces in 5 gallons of cold water, and an overnight soak for cleaning. This is a lot more than needed for sanitizing. Bottles must then be rinsed really well. It does a great job of cleaning bottles.
There is a lot of info in Charlie’s book that is so out of date they appear to have been written on stone tablets. I used bleach for exactly the same reason… it was in Papazian’s book but that was nearly 30 years ago. Today I would never use bleach. Ever.
This is great advice.
THIS
regarding OP, i buy about 4oz of iodophor every 18 months for brewing. i bought one bottle on amazon a few years ago so you could get it there. i do 1ml in a syringe in 750ml of water in a spraybottle. i use it very liberally and yeah it lasta a long time and breaks down to maybe 25 cents worth per brew. i prefer iodophor to starsan, mainly because starsan seems to be hard to find in canada. dont use bleach unless you jave decided you have a real, serious need for it ie. persistent contamination over many brews
Allow me to straddle the middle ground here.
I agree that iodophor and Star San/Saniclean are sufficient for sanitization around the brewhouse, and rarely is there a true “need” for bleach that wouldn’t be covered by one of those more commonly used sanitizers. Chloramine is certainly a risk in using bleach.
That said, bleach isn’t really the boogeyman that it’s made out to be. Just be sure to rinse it well. You can also neutralize it easily using hydrogen peroxide or an ascorbic acid solution if you’re concerned about leaving residue behind. It works great as a sanitizer, and there’s no real reason not to use it if you’re comfortable with how to handle it.
Well said- it’s all in the care of use. There is plenty of advice out there about the benefit of switching up sanitizers every once in a while to cover all the potential contamination organisms. To answer the OP’s question (to the best of my ability) - a 10% bleach solution is strong enough. This is what we used in teaching laboratories during Covid, based upon CDC recommendations for surfaces potentially contaminated with that virus. Rinse well!
See… it’s the rinsing part that I don’t like. I’ve gone through the effort to clean and then sanitize my equipment but then you tell me to run water, with its myriad of microbes, all over it. Not thanks.
And this is why I stick to Star San and PBW. Beach is NOT no-rinse. Yeast use it to form chlorophenols, which creates a band-aid/plasticky off flavor.
Bleach is no rinse for food service at the appropriate ratio.
https://waterandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/3-Sink-Cleanupstamp_Letter_COLOR.pdf
https://waterandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Kitchen-Cleanup-Surfacesstamp_Letter_COLOR.pdf
As a caveat, I always rinse/sanitize fermenter with StarSan right before use.
Iodophor is not very effective against mold spores, which I think is what my bottles had
that a bleach solution eliminated.
I may be wrong, but I thought iodophor was more effective than StarSan with mold spores
I don’t think your possibly wrong, it’s that you possibly don’t recall correctly.
As I am getting older it happens more often with me.
Without the internet/phone I would be wandering the streets looking for my home.
Cheers
Ah, that article. Seems like they used the wrong concentration of iodophor. Incorrect info.
You can use it as a no rinse sanitizer for food service, but as far as beer is concerned bleach should generally be rinsed, because even at low residual amounts yeast can turn it into detectable amounts of chlorophenols.
Agreed
Agreed.