Electronic bottle sanitizer for home brew

A typical home brew beer recipe makes a 21 – 23 L batch. If you’re not kegging, this means 70 empties or 30 swappas. Either way, that’s a lot of cleaning, sanitizing, priming, filling and capping.

After several batches, I got sick of the process. Something had to be done about this cumbersome ordeal, especially the bottle sanitizing. Here, I would typically fill a bottle with ~100ml sanitizer, cover with my thumb, shake, then carefully transfer to the next. Quite a tiring process and also not good for my thumb.

The better option was a Vinator, a manual pump-action recirculating sanitizer, but pricing was prohibitive. Besides this, the manual pump action wasn’t enough of an improvement to convince me to purchase. What was I to do?

Soln.

No more dilemma. This is my (prototype) electronic pump-powered recirculating sanitizer. It uses a high pressure diaphragm pump to force sanitizer through several pinholes in a silicone rubber nozzle. A microswitch, by contact with a bottle, activates the motor (I tried a light curtain set-up with inconsistent results so went for the boring option instead.)

Well anyway, it works:

It can even sanitize my ceiling…

Field trial will commence with my next batch 😉