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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
  Re: Bleach and acid sanitizer ("Craig S. Cottingham")
  Re: Bleach + Water + Vinegar (le Man)
  Bleach and Other Acids ("A.J deLange")
  Star San (Matt)
  Re: vinegar in bleach or beer. ("-s@adelphia.net")


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Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:33:33 -0500
From: "Craig S. Cottingham" <craig.cottingham at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Bleach and acid sanitizer

On Jul 11, 2007, at 10:09, Bill Velek <billvelek at alltel.net> wrote:

> I think it will be a good idea to do
> something like the following to be ABSOLUTELY safe:
>
> Fill my bottling bucket with 5 gallons of cold water
> Add one ounce of _cheap_ bleach w/ 6% sodium hypochlorite
> Stir very well
> Take outside (the kitchen door is close to where I sanitize anyway)
> Add one ounce of white vinegar to one glass of water and stir (this is
> just an added precaution which probably isn't necessary, but won't  
> hurt)
> Blend vinegar water and bleach water and stir
> Allow to vent for a few minutes outside before bringing indoors

The stuff about moving outside and then back inside is unnecessary,  
as is premixing the vinegar with a glass of water before adding it to  
your bottling bucket. The important steps are:

1. Fill bottling bucket with water
2. Add 1 oz household bleach and stir
3. Add 1 oz white vinegar and stir

> Now, as for this supposedly being 'no rinse', and the comment by  
> someone
> regarding vinegar's lasting effects (taste or odor??), could something
> like ascorbic acid (vitamin c) be used instead?

*Could* it be used? Yes. However, the vitamin C tablets in your  
medicine cabinet probably are a salt of ascorbic acid, which isn't  
the same thing (though I don't know this for a fact), and they  
contain a lot of other stuff (cellulose, food grade wax, etc). Trying  
to figure out how much vitamin C, by weight, contains as many moles  
of acid as 1 ounce, by volume, of kitchen-grade acetic acid makes my  
head hurt, and I earned a degree in this subject, many moons ago.

> I don't know about the vinegar; I
> suppose it could leave a sediment of acetic acid (or whatever); is  
> that
> where the problem would be with any possible odor or flavor?

One fluid ounce US is 6 teaspoons. Into 5 gallons of water, that's a  
little more than 1 teaspoon per gallon. That's a ratio of 1 to 768.

Let's say you have five gallons of bleach/vinegar/water mixture in  
your bottling bucket. You pour it into something else, so the bucket  
appears to be empty. Of course it's not; there's still a little film  
of liquid on the surface. It puddles in the bottom of the bucket, and  
you get maybe a teaspoon of free liquid. (This is just a wild-and- 
crazy guess, but it seems about right.) That's one teaspoon out of  
five gallons, which had only 6 teaspoons of vinegar in it to start  
with. You're down to 1/768th of a teaspoon of vinegar in that little  
puddle in the bottom of the bucket. If you then add five gallons of  
liquid on top of it, you're diluting it even further. I can't imagine  
that such a little amount of vinegar would be detectable, even in  
water. If you're adding five gallons of beer, well, hopefully your  
beer has more flavor than water. :-)

If you don't want to take my word for it, it's easy to test. Add 6  
teaspoons white vinegar to 5 gallons of water. Pour the water on your  
hop bines (this time of year, they'll thank you for it :-). Add 5  
gallons of water back to the bucket. Taste.

- --
Craig S. Cottingham
BJCP Certified judge from Olathe, KS ([621, 251.1deg] Apparent  
Rennerian)
craig.cottingham at gmail.com




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Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:31:45 +0100
From: le Man <hbd at thebarnsleys.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Bleach + Water + Vinegar

HI Bill,

Being a Septic, I listened to Charlie's interview, and then decided to 
give it a try.

It may be me, but when mixed correctly, I could detect NO aroma of 
vinegar or chlorine in the mixed product. The fermenting bins I used 
were left to drain/dry, In the dried bin there was NO aroma of 
vinegar/chlorine. I even took some of the drainings and added it in 
proportion to a pint of beer  . . . . .  No tainting was detectable

Is it an effective sanintser . . . well the jury is out on that one, but 
the batch of beer brewed in the fermenters is very nice indeed.

- --
leman (The Brewer Formerly Known As Aleman)
Mashing In Blackpool, Lancashire, UK



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Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:58:07 +0000
From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net>
Subject: Bleach and Other Acids

I was the one that mentioned the persistance of vinegar smell. Perhaps 
it doesn't apply here. Any other acid should do. One might want to avoid 
hydrochloric as the chlorine emission is more "efficient" if chloride is 
present (but note that bleach made from brine or chlorine and lye 
already contains chloride ion). It seems to me that lactic or phosphoric 
acids would be suitable choices as they are likely to be found in the 
brewery, are available in food grade at most home brew supply shops and, 
in the case of the phosphoric at least, are flavor neutral. Remember 
that it is important to keep the pH above about 4 - say 6 to be on the 
safe side. Note that about 97% of the chlorine HOCl at pH 6 (pK = 7.5).  
A good way to procede would be to dilute the bleach and then add the 
acid in small increments monitoring pH with a meter or test strips as 
you go keeping track of how much it takes to get to pH 6. In the future 
use the same amount of same strength acid with the bleach of the same 
trade percent (same brand). Working ouside and standing up wind seem 
like good ideas to me. I'll stick with iodophor.

A.J.


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Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:41:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matt <baumssl27 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Star San

Craig says "I've been using Star-San almost as long as 
I've been brewing, and it was interesting to find out that I've been 
using it almost entirely incorrectly all this time."

For those of us who for whatever reason cannot listen to the podcasts,
is there a surprising or counterintuitive "correct" way to use Star
San?




       


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Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:59:53 -0400
From: "-s at adelphia.net" <-s@adelphia.net>
Subject: Re: vinegar in bleach or beer.

Despite my own note to the contrary I *think* the correct method is to
add bleach to the diluted vinegar.   Any other thoughts ?

BillV continues ... 
> Fill my bottling bucket with 5 gallons of cold water
> Add one ounce of _cheap_ bleach w/ 6% sodium hypochlorite
>   
That's only a ~100ppm of hydrochlorous and even accounting for the
increased availability of the HOCl - it does not meet USF standards as a
sanitizer.  You should ave double the concentration (200ppm) at a
minimum.

> Now, as for this supposedly being 'no rinse', and the comment by someone 
> regarding vinegar's lasting effects (taste or odor??),
My baloney detector is pegging out.  Vinegar is NOT out of place in
beer.   By this I mean that acetic acid (as far as I know the only flavor
component in distilled or white vinegar) is the most common organic
acid in normal beer at around 57-145ppm.   Yeast leak a little acetic as
they make fatty acids frm acetylCoA.    Now I had some Shepherd
Neame Spitfire ale once that exceeded those amounts by a lot, and tho'
it was odd it was not at all bad.  Addding an extra 1or 2 (or 10)ppm
of acetic residue to beer will have absolutely no impact on flavor.

"Distilled" white vinegar means the vinegar is concentrated (see the
definition of 'distilled').  It does NOT mean that the vinegar passed
through a reflux still.  "Distilled vinegar" may include viable
aceobacteria.  treat it accordingly.


>  could something 
> like ascorbic acid (vitamin c) be used instead?
You can go to a winemaking shop and get various acid plends or you can
use phosphoric or whatever you use  to acidify water.

>   Also, I generally let 
> my iodophor pretty much dry in my bottles, since I use a bottle tree, 
> but my carboys and bottling bucket drain without drying before I'm ready 
> to use them.  But I don't know how bleach and vinegar will work.  I know 
> the bleach will evaporate, IIRC, but I don't know about the vinegar;

You'll get acetic acid residue - but that's a non-issue.  Some of the bleach
will very slowly evolve as Cl2 gas and "leave the building".  
Unfortunately much
of the bleach residue will remain as dry hypochlorite salts and sit in 
your bottle
awaiting the arrival of beer or wort to make an awful flavor.

I really don't see  hypochlorite salts as any sort non-rinse sanitizer 
when just
a few ppb of chlorophenols will ruin a beer.

Let's ballpark a bit.  Let's assume that for a 5 gallon batch your residue
amounts to 1 fl.oz of your 100ppm hypochlorous solution, and that 50% of
the Cl disappears as Cl2 gas.  This is a VERY VERY conservative estimate
because:
    100ppm hypochlorous is not strong enough, you should use 200ppm,
    it's VERY unlikely you can keep all the rinse residue in all the tubes
          and bottles down to 1 fl.oz,
    I suspect you'll retain 80-95% as hypochlorite, not 50%.

Still - when you remix that 50ppm  at  1 fl.ounce into 5 gal (dilute by 640)
you're just under 0.1ppm of hypochlorous in your beer and this can
produce about 250ppb of chlorophenolics which have a flavor threshold
around 10ppb.  So if you break your hump keeping the chlorous ions
dilute you can still have bad flavors at about 25 times above their
flavor threshold.  This sounds like a bad choice for no-rinse.

Use iodophor for your no-rinse, and adjust the ph on that too.

 -S



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