Steam Cleaning?

[MickyD]

Has anyone tried this in regard to cleaning the bottles or keg you are going to store your freshly brewed beer in?

I was looking at the wallpaper stripper the other day which is a large volume kettle basically with a hose, and was trying to come up with a way of building something like a bottle tree (not as big obviously) with copper pipe and connecting the steam stripper to it.

The idea I had was to have a square or ring of copper tubing with say 10 bits of short copper tubing coming off the main ring. I would then put 10 empty bottles over each tube (which would be cut to about half the length of a 500ml bottle) The main ring I would then connect to the steamer and allow the steam to purge through the ring and out of the smaller tubes into the bottles.

Do any of you think the steam from this would be sufficient to kill bacteria (certainly kills you hands if the get in the way)?

How long would the bottles need to be steamed for to sterilise them (maybe for the parents here that question)?


This is all hypothetical.

The amount of bottles I suggested (10) was just a guess. I havent worked out yet if its possible to connect the steamer, or how much tubing and joints I would need.

[Aleman]

I have used a Length of tube on a 3 gallon bucket to steam sterilse corny kegs, but I've never been keen on it to be honest. For yeast ranching purposes you are looking at 20 minutes at 15psi of pressure to sterilse things but do you need that for bottles???

[MickyD]

You are quite right Aleman it probably is overkill (pardon the pun) to steam sterilise bottles when sanitising with bleach or some other chemical method is quite possibly cheaper and just as effective for the end result.

I was just trying to find out if theres any thoughts on this. I myself currently have started using simple thin bleach as its possibly the cheapest and most readily available sanitiser.