Unscented Clorox

[Rocky]

I was watching "Good Eats" with Alton Brown last night (I just gotta stop watching cooking shows!) and he was making beer. He sanitized all of his equipment in a solution consisting of 2 tablespoons of unscented Clorox in 5 gallons of water. Do any of our beer makers do this? Do any of our wine makers do this?

Thanks.

 

[cmsben61]

I saw the same episode and wondered myself. I have always been told not to use bleach as a sanitizer. Something about it leading to cork taint

 

[cintipam]

THe first wine making book I ever read gave that as the recommended sterilizer. It was written by the prez of large prominate wine making club. But it was an older book years before oxyclean hit the market. I actually used that method on the first couple gallon batches of wine I made. But gallon jugs don't last long enuf to have any ill effects, esp since I didn't bother to bottle it.

Pam in cinti

 

[orto]

I make beer, most beer makers use star san, or iodophor. Bleach is bad and can make your beer taste like band-aids if you don't rinse it all off. star san, and iodophor don't need to be rinsed off at all, so bleach is terrible by comparison. Another interesting thing is depending on the ph of the water you mix bleach with it may not even be sanitizing that well anyway.

 

[BernardSmith]

I think the benefit of using K-meta or hydrogen peroxide to sanitize equipment by far outweighs the risk of tainting your wine through contact by the bleach with naturally occurring fungi in/on corks which produces a chemical called TCA, and which by all accounts is incredibly difficult to completely remove from the space where you make your wine. Even if you don't use real corks and so the risk of TCA is negligible to non existent, you still need to rinse the bleach off and rinsing re-introduces the bacteria and mold and other microbes that you just tried to remove by bleaching...

 

[Rocky]

Thank you all for the replies. I was just wondering because I don't remember Alton saying anything about thoroughly rinsing the equipment. I was very skeptical and I will stay with my K-meta solution for sanitizing.