safely sterilizing bottles

[Blues N Brew]

hello all, has anyone boiled bottles to sterilize? or used the oven? i have bottles that have had sour beer in them and also have a few scratches from the bottle brush so i figured maybe fill them with water and put them in a hot water bath 180-200F for a hour or 2 then let them cool and proceed with standard bottling procedure, this shouldn't crack or weaken the bottles right? on a side note they are heavy champagne bottles so that should help, thanks

 

[Herm brews]

I can’t speak of sours, since I don’t drink them. But I have put bottles in the oven to dry after a thorough cleaning and rinse, but I’m talking standard 12 ounce beer bottles. And oven temps of about 150F. I would think your proposition of a water bath of 180F would kill most anything in well under an hour.

 

[Mark Farrall]

You don't need to sterilise to get rid of the microbes from a sour beer. A few minutes at 70C/158F will kill the sour microbes in a clean bottle. I'd get rid of any bottle with scratches. It really increases the chances of cross contamination regardless of whether it's a sour or not.

 

[Steve SPF]

I know nothing about sours so what @Mark Farrall said there; the voice of experience.

My own process - though I don't bottle much these days - is to rinse bottles x 3 as they are emptied so there's no residue left. Put them through the (domestic) dishwasher prior to use and then use a no-rinse sanitiser prior to filling. We use Peracetic at 0.5% but Chemsan would be just as effective - if horrifically expensive - and I've never lost a bottle to infection with the process.

To my mind, if I've got something to pasteurising temp and held it there for a few moments it's job done. Note that there's no science to this and there are far more scintific minds than mine here.

 

[Minbari]

You don't need to sterilise to get rid of the microbes from a sour beer. A few minutes at 70C/158F will kill the sour microbes in a clean bottle. I'd get rid of any bottle with scratches. It really increases the chances of cross contamination regardless of whether it's a sour or not.

2nd this. When i bottled exclusively, i always just used a bottle washer with heated PBW in it. 10-15min per batch and i never had any infections from dirty bottles