Mike Zagger Asked:
I, like many new home brewers, scavenge manufacturer bottles in order to avoid purchasing them at the beer making supply store. I am still looking for the best method to remove manufacturer labels from the bottles. Many home brewers have their own special method. Perhaps the club members could share
Dale McComb Replied:
I bought some cheap plastic dish pans a couple years ago. What I do is submerge the bottles in the dish pans containing a solution of Cascade. Leave them in that solution overnight, and it works wonders!
How easy they come off depends on the label. The foil labels can be quite the pain. Others float right off, and all you have to do is rinse the outside of the bottle. In any event, the overnight soak in Cascade makes the task a whole lot easier.
In retrospect regarding the dish pans, though, I'd go to Restaurant Equippers or Wasserstrom, and get some of the larger, heavy-duty gray plastic pans like they use to bus tables in restaurants. They'll last longer, reducing the long-term cost, and because the dimensions are bigger all around, will hold more bottles at a time.
Tom Jones Replied:
I have just removed labels from 48 bottles with foil (shiny) labels, which is supposed to be hard to get off. I soaked the bottles in a sink using warm water and about 1/2 cup of ammonia and let them soak for about 2 hours. It was an easy job to remove the labels.
For more information, I suggest you refer to the July 1996 issue of Brew Your Own magazine for an article titled "The Great Bottle Cleaning Shootout".
Mark and Bonni Katona Replied:
We went to the Pace-Hi carryout and paid the deposit on a couple of cases of empty Rhineland beer bottles. We found that these labels soak off much more easily than other brands
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