Sparkling mineral water bottles

[Sheepy]

Hi all.
A quick question for my first post.
My first kit is ready to go into bottles and im doing this one on the cheap (more money to spend in the pub after rugby ). I have gone for PET bottles (morrisins fizzy water). Am i right in thinking I wont need to clean them, just empty out the contents and pop my suagar and beer in?
Cheers.
Sheepy.

[Chris The Fish]

lazy git



when i bottled my barley wine recently i didnt bother to clean them out before i put the brew in, partly because i think my barley wine is shot (see my 'dead' thread) and partly because i thought that they would be sterile prior to sticking in the water, and have had no chance to become infected since.

i may be wrong, however after a week in the bottles by barley wine doesnt show any signs of infection.

chris

[prodigal2]

PET bottles are great for bottling, but you will need to sterilise your bottles.
DaaB covers the basics very well here:
http://www.18000feet.com/cleaning_and_sanitising.htm

yes its a PITA, but time and money brewing, you don't want to waste it at the bottling stage.

[Sheepy]

As at the moment they are unopened and still contain the mineral water I was wondering if this time sterilization would not be required as they would have been sterilized prior to the (probably sterile too) water going in.

[steve_flack]

Bottled water isn't necessarily sterile. In fact it often is anything but.

[oblivious]

Not uncommon to find a higher bio load in bottle water compare to tap

[steve_flack]

There are legal limits to bacterial contamination in tap water. I don't think the same applies to bottled.