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I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment we will talk about how
we get our bottles ready to use for bottling. Alright so we have kind of finished off your
primary fermentation. You don't have any more bubbles coming out of your air lock. Your
beer is becoming nice and clear with a nice sediment of yeast down in the bottom and now
you are getting ready to decide that it is about time for bottling. Before we start bottling
we want to make sure that we have enough clean bottles. For a five gallon batch you are going
to need about 60 - 12 ounce bottles or 40 - 16 ounce bottles. Now if you have bought
your beer bottles from the the store you're really not going to have to worry about giving
them an intense cleaning, however, if your friend comes over and he gives you a nice
bottle of beer saying I know that you can use this for home brewing you're going to
need to take some more evasive cleaning operations. The first thing you're going to want to do
is do a rinse of the bottle just for your own sake, shake it up, and pour it up and
that will get most of the beer residue out. If they gave you a bottle that has been aging
for a while kind of just with a little beer in the bottom you might want to check the
bottom and see if there is a whole bunch of gunk down there. If there is you might be
better cleaning it out or throwing it away. If you bought a bottle washer, you can attach
this to your sink and use it to forcefully clean it out and it also helps in some rinsing
processes if you need to do that. Now that you've rinsed out your bottles you're going
to want to put it in some type of soaking solution. I recommended the chlorine that
we talked about earlier or using the strake. This will break up the gunk and help you get
it out earlier and also will break up any deposits that are in the bottom. After you're
soaking your beer bottles for a little while the labels will usually come off easily. Sometimes
you may need to use a more aggressive pad and clean them off but overall just work on
it and you'll get them clean pretty quickly. After soaking them in the cleaner you're going
to want to rinse them out either using your bottle washer or just your sink. Now that
you have got your clean bottles you're going to want to soak them in one of the sanitizing
solutions that you used on your bottles today. You're going to want to use iora or chlorine
at that nice concentration, however, you're going to have to rinse it or one step or the
five star star stamp.