Can you? Should you? How do you?
Reason is i have a TON of bottles that need to be sanitized, and I really don’t feel like doing it one by one… by one… by… well you get the idea.
If you have a sanitize cycle on your dishwasher it should work fine. Just make sure that there’s no detergent or rinsing agents in there.
By all means! Sanitize in your dishwasher. You are so lucky to have that option, really wish I had that option. Use the no soap/detergent setting and you should be set.
I have not used the dishwasher to sanitize bottles, but I have used it to clean them.
I would advise checking the first batch to see if there is any residue of sorts left inside the bottle (dried bits of ground up food for instance, or soap residue). I had issues with gunk hidden iside the innards of the bottom of the dishwasher from the load before… getting sprayed and dried on the inside of a batch of bottles. I also found that the long necks did not always allow the bottoms of the bottles to get clean if the bottle was tipped slightly.
However, if your dishwasher has a setting like my new one…“Sanitize” it essentially will pasteurize the bottles. So if the bottles are already “clean” then I think it is a great idea!
Good luck!
Yup, this one’s been discussed before. Back when I did a lot of bottling, I would always run my bottles through the dishwasher like any other dishes. When bottling day came I’d put a little bleach in the bottom of the dishwasher & run a sani cycle with just the “clean” bottles. Never had any problems.
See also this thread.
My first 5 gallon batch, I used StarSan to sanitize my bottles. De-labeled with a hot water and detergent soak, washed them out with PBW, rinsed them out with clean water, then poured sanitizer into each bottle. I had to handle each bottle at least 4 times, NOT counting the delabeling part. What a pain.
My next two 5 gallon batches (both bottled this week) I used the dishwasher. I had to de-label about 30 more bottles. I made sure all of them were thouroughly rinsed out and clean as soon as they were empty, and I stored them upside down in 12-pack boxes so they’d stay that way. Come bottling day, I filled the dishwasher with bottles (held exactly 48 at a time!), and ran them through a “Hi-Temp wash, Sani-Rinse, and Heated-Dry” cycle. Took about an hour. Then I cracked the door to let them cool off. I figured since they’re still upsidedown, they wouldn’t get recontaminated. Once they were cool, I just pulled them out one at a time, and used the dishwasher door as my bottling platform.
On bottling day, I only had to handle each bottle once using this procedure before putting beer into the bottle.
I had thoughts about getting one of those squirt-the-sanitizer-into-the-bottle thingamagigs, but now I’ve changed my mind. I’m even wondering now if kegging would really save me that much more time.
Here they are, 96 bottles of malty goodness:
If you have the setting put them on the high heat dry, and high heat wash.
On a side note I have a buddy who loves his homebrew but doesn’t have a dishwasher. He put about a tablespoon of water in each bottle, lays as many as he can in the microwave and lets the microwave go for about 5 minutes. The steam from the water cleans everything inside and out! It was actually an idea he had from sanitizing baby bottles.