I bought some 5 Star - Star San on line and it arrived in a jug inside a sealed plastic bag. For some reason, most of the direction were smudged off on to the plastic bag.
So, can some one please give me the direction for mixing this to sterilize equipment. I need to do a carboy and siphon hose etc today and then bottles in a few weeks.
Thanks.
1 oz per 5 gallons of warm water. Or scale down at your convenience.
I have to admit I’ve never used it with anything but cold water. So I take it warm is OK?
Best to use distilled or RO water. It’ll keep for months or until it grows cloudy. Reusable as well. Supposed to be a minimum of one minute contact time. I’ve done less with no problems.
Thanks for the reply.
I’m afraid all I’ve got for water is plain old tap water. But, we do have both warm and cold…
I’ll scale it back to 2 1/2 gallons (10 L?) and add 1/2 an ounce by the measuring thingee on the bottle. Only have a small pail to mix it in so we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks again.
I wouldn’t use hot water but warm should be okay. I’ve read that 30 seconds contact time is enough. That’s always worked for me but of course YMMV.
The bottle I bought is looking like it will last the rest of my life. I mixed up my first batch in a bucket with a lid using distilled water. After close to a year I tossed it out only because I couldn’t convince myself it was still good. It had odds and ends sitting on the bottom of the bucket but the water was still crystal clear.
Paul
And I don’t need to rinse it right? I’ve had OK results with bleach but I rinse the heck out of stuff.
No rinsing. ;D
big +1
Feels weird to not rinse it. ???
It’ll be fine. There’s a saying about Starsan: Don’t fear the foam!
OK. No sense asking if I don’t listen to the answers I’m given.
Thanks again for all the help.
If I use tap water, it turns cloudy within minutes, which I’m told is not so good. I have some distilled water which I use in the spray bottle, but my usual use of it in tap water is only for what I happen to be doing on that particular weekend.
FL water is high in carbonates (high alkalinity)–that’s why your starsan solution goes cloudy so soon.
Use distilled water with your starsan. I get 5 gallons for $1.50 at the local Publix (just take a better bottle or old plastic water jug and fill it up). I store it in a 5 gallon Homer bucket. Keeps a long time (crystal clear).
I still recommend a second agent during the earlier stages of the cleaning / sanitizing process to kill off any bacteria or wild yeast that are acid-tolerant. There’s a thread earlier about that.
I use soft water for starsan. It works great & lasts a long time. Our hard water is high alkaline. CaCO3 = 236 and PH is 7.6. I need to have Ward Labs test our soft water. Cheers!!!
High pH is not good for StarSan. The way the stuff works, at pH under 3.5 it kills bacteria deader-than-dead in around 30 sec. When the pH goes above 3.5, it turns pretty much harmless. So, you don’t want really alkaline water, or a lot of PBW residue left around, etc. The inventor of the stuff mentioned that you can acidify your water with a little white vinegar to make sure the StarSan doesn’t get deactivated. There was a really good episode of the Brewing Network where they interviewed the inventor & president of the company (Five Star). Check the archive and look for ‘Sanitation Show’. I think it was a couple years back. Edit: Date of the show was 3/18/2006. A must-listen.
I’ve heard of using phosphoric acid to “acidify” the StarSan solution.
5% Acetate (vinegar) does have a pH around 2.4, but I wonder whether it would be the ideal acid to use given that we want to use the StarSan solution as a “no rinse” sanitizer. Most beer styles we attempt to brew would get dinged for any “vinegar” or “acetic” aromas or flavor.
If you already have phosphoric acid around (like for sparge water acidification) I think that would be the ideal way to go, seeing as that’s what they use in the formula in the first place. I brought up the vinegar because the guy from 5 star mentioned it. He also said that the cloudiness you get from hard water is a product of the surfactant reacting with magnesium in the water.
That’s correct. Our soft water PH is lower. After sitting in a container for 6 months the PH is still below 3 and the solution remains crystal clear. Cheers!!!
Would Star Sa hurt an aluminum pot? I have to bottle a batch of beer and I don’t have a good 5 gal pail to put the sugar into and so I wondered if I could just clean my aluminum pot that I use to boil the wort and sterilize it. Any thoughts about using Star San for this? Will it react in any way?