Homebrew Stuff

General Stuff About Homebrew (Updated at Random)

Sanitizing Materials: 

I generally sanitize all of my equipment prior to brewing, transferring, or bottling using bleach. I have found this to be easy to find, really inexpensive, safe, and easy to use. I use it as follows:

1 Tablespoon of bleach for every gallon of water. 

Let sit for at least 15 minutes.

Rinse

That's all you need to do. 

To sanitize bottles, I complete the above process in the bottling bucket, and fill each bottle individually. 

Obtaining Bottles:

If you are like me, then you bottle your homebrew. Some people keg, but I like to bottle because then I can store my beer for longer and I am also able to give people bottles to drink at their leisure. The issue is that I refuse to buy bottles from the homebrew store. 

Fortunately, I drink a fair amount of beer. All I do is take off the labels when I'm done. To do this, just soak bottles in hot water. Depending what the company uses for an adhesive, the label may just fall off. Below I am going to lay out particular breweries that are easy to de-label the bottle and what breweries have particularly difficult bottles. I will update this as I try different bottles.

Good For De-lableing 

Guinness

Smithwick's

Hoegaarden

Any Belgian Brewery

Any German Brewery

Sam Smith's

Sam Adams

Brooklyn
Butternuts 

Southern Tier

Bad For De-labeling

Saranac

Troegs 

Ommegang
Heavy Seas
Kona
Left Hand
3 Heads Brewing 

Dogfish Head
Clown Shoes 

Anything else you want to see on here? Let me know.