Bottle sanitization in oven?

Using your sanitizer (Starsan?) with RO water should help and keep your house a lot cooler in the Summer : )

Lots of people do use the oven for sanitizing.

 

I like to use starsan for a couple of reasons:

If you reuse bottles, there's a chance you get some bacteria on the inside of your bottles, even if drying them upside-down. I double-check my bottles against the light and reclean them when I need to. I think starsan helps rinse the bottles out one final time before bottling.

The foam also helps me see when the bottle is getting full when filling and are a visual mark for me to slow down and not overfill.

I pour the last few drops out on the kitchen floor and it's soo much easier when beer spills.

I've got starsan out for the bottle caps anyway. It's easy to resanitize a bottle if it tips over, I touch the lid, etc.

An oven might be a good way to do a couple hundred bottles. I hope it never comes to that for me

 

I've done it many times without an issue.

 

You can sanitize in the oven. It does work. But I'm not sure how it relates to or will help with the phenolic problem you mention. If you're worried that residue from your water is contributing off flavors, remember that you're going to have to rinse the bottles before heating, and they will probably contain at least as much residue as you would get using sanitizer and drying them on a bottle tree. The other potential drawback is that heating does weaken the bottles, and if you plan on re-using them several times, you may eventually encounter some bottles that crack upon opening etc.

If you believe your water is contributing off flavors, then I would switch to RO water for mash/sparge and sanitation. It costs about .35 a gallon at the supermarket.

 

RO water does not contain chlorine...that's the point...and No, nothing kills chlorine (campden tablets will remove it), but mixing Starsan with anything other than RO/distilled water can leave a nasty off-flavor and change the ph making it ineffective.

 

RO water does not contain chlorine. It doesn't contain much of anything, other than H20 and some very low levels of trace minerals. (Which is important to know if you're AG brewing, because you will typically need to add some form of calcium.) If you're saying that you've tried RO water and the problem you have still persists, then your water is not the source of your problem.

 

Or the RO system (specifically the carbon pre/post-filter) was not working properly/effectively.

 

I have heard that sanitizing in the oven makes the bottles brittle and more likely to break. I have never used the oven before to sanitize ( I just load the dishwasher, wash with an extra long rinse, and then immediately add the beer) so I am not sure if this is true.

 

Sterilizing in the Autoclave certainly makes them brittle, and can cause them to break... my one bottle bomb occurred because of stress from autoclaving.

 

RO filter systems have pre and post carbon filters that will remove the chlorine. I've read that chlorine is damaging to the membrane.

 

I'm leery of the hot/cold cycle and the associated mechanical stress. There would likely be no problems from doing this once or twice but eventually the glass will fail.

 

If you think the problem is chlorine then treat your water with campden, if you still have the same problem then it's not from chlorine.

 

do you have a chlorine problem or not? do you have chloramine and you are just not effectively removing all of it?

i am fairly convinced that when you say " it's the water. Don't even bother asking more questions, it's the water" it is, in fact, the water.
otherwise you would not be here. so we are going to ask more questions.

tell us about your water and your water filtration. all of it.
there are more than a few experienced water chemists around here and it looks like you are having a water problem.
Cheers.

 

You can sanitize the bottles at 165F which will have no effect on the bottles. I've done this probably 20 times with no bad results, but I usually cook them at 180F. And it takes 10-20 minutes in the oven.

 

In the oven you need to go higher for longer, as it is dry heat. Palmer has some guidelines.

 

Here they are:

Temperature Duration
338°F (170°C) 60 minutes
320°F (160°C) 120 minutes
302°F (150°C) 150 minutes
284°F (140°C) 180 minutes
250°F (121°C) 12 hours (Overnight)

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter2-2-3.html