Sanitizing

Everyone I talked to emphasized over and over again how important it is to ensure that everything that touches the “must” (that’s what you call the initial mixture of water, honey and yeast) is sanitized. You can buy various cleaning products at a local home brew shop to do this and my Wine Starter Kit included a package of sodium metabisulphite to make a cleaning solution. A little research revealed that plain bleach does the job just as well.

 

Cleaning Recipe
15 ml (1 tablespoon) of unscented bleach
1 gallon of tap water

 

Put everything into the white primary bucket that will fit. Add in the bleach & water solution. Close it and shake well so the solution touches every surface. It just needs to touch everything, you don’t need to go crazy with this. Remove the top of the bucket and use the top to lay out all your freshly sanitized equipment. Whatever doesn’t fit in the bucket add in there now, as far as it will fit, and use your hands (wear gloves) to cover everything, inside and out with the cleaning solution. Now rinse. I’m fanatic about this. I rinsed three times. Let it all air dry.

 

What I like best about using bleach is that it’s biodegradable; it degrades into water and (inedible) salt. Just rinse well and you’ve got it covered. And this is cheep too! Do you know how little bleach 15 ml is?