OK, so I had a ton of bottles to clean up. I made up my cleaning sauce with a scoop of OxyClean in a 5-gallon bucket of water. Then I soaked all of the bottles - the stuff is awesome, I would fill up the bucket with bottles and then leave it overnight. Works great, takes labels off, eats any crud out of the bottom for the bottles that friends didn’t rinse out from being left in their garage for weeks. I have a jet bottle washer so I rinsed the heck out of all of them before loading them on the tree to dry. This method doesn’t use much water at all, not like what it used to take with filling the sink with soap and then running them under the faucet.
I must have put about 10 cases of bottles through there, and by the last case or two that water was pretty awful, but still working. So my question - Was I a genius for saving time, water, and oxyclean, or an idiot for infecting 10 cases of bottles with that nasty soup? I’ll still plan to soak them with BTF or StarSan before bottling. Or should I just RDWHAHB?
Time will tell. I would personally just change the water in between cases but thats me. My sanitizing and cleaning process is top notch though Kinda OCD
You’ll be OK. The Oxy breaks everything loose and the jet knocks it out. When I bottled, I would rinse empties or use the jet if they sat a bit. If I saw anything stuck on after that, I would use OxyClean. Sanitize before bottling. Man, I love kegging!
Let’s say you can fit 1 case in your tub. The 1st bottle you pull out, after sitting all night, will have about the same contaminants on it as the last bottle. Next case will have the same possibility of contaminants.
You ran them through a jet washer to get the last to the crud out. And will sanitize before use.
I’ve found that oxy will leave some sediment when it gets too old. I soak then rinse with the bottle jet, but just a rinse on the outside. When the oxy gets old, there would be some film on the outside when dry. Some of that may have come from soaking off labels, though. I decided to soak off labels separately.
I think you’ll be fine. The oxi-clean soak is to get the bottles clean/ free of debris. As long as they are rinsed properly and sanitized before use, I see no problem. Emphasis on the rinsing…make sure there’s no label glue or pieces of labels stuck to the inside.
