Sterilizing the bottles
No problem. A word of caution, I would not rinse this sanitizer from your bottles, just them dry mouth down. The beauty of iodophor is that it evaporates and leaves no residue behind. I personally don't even wait for my equipement to dry before using it since it is completely harmless to get a small abount of it in your brew. I believe you need to hit somewhere in the neighborhood of 25ppm before you can even taste it in solution, and by letting some get diluted in beer you are orders of magnitude below that threshold. If you rinse after using it you are actually undoing what you've just done by risking microbial introduction in the process of adding more water.
Best wishes,
Edds
I should point out here, that technically, your treated city water (probably not well water) should be sterile so long as nothing in your pipes or on the faucet nozzle changes that...
Of course, I still never rinse my sanitizer out, either.
OK. Got it. No need to rinse out the iodophor!
However, after visiting a number of pharmacies and a hospital supplies shop, working through a translator, I had no luck finding any kind of iodine that I could trust in Hanoi. Mostly I got blank looks when I tried to explain what I was trying to do.
One place did suggest that I use alcohol. Can anybody think of any reason why alcohol couldn't be used? They were selling a 96% ethanol solution which I figure would evaporate quickly and totally, without leaving any taste.
However, wikipedia says it kills bacteria but not bacterial spores, which doesn't sound promising.
What was questionable about the iodine you did find? If you were using any kind of alcohol, I wouldn't use anything short of 70% isopropyl. It will not do as good of a job and there are things that may be left behind. I wouldn't mind to use it in a pinch, but I wouldn't use it regularly. Iodine does a good job reacting with structures from a wide variety of organisms and is extreme effective. Can you have things shipped to you?
It was questionable as to whether it was actually iodine! I found the same, virtually unmarked Chinese bottle in a couple places. I'm pretty sure it was iodine (judging by the colour and smell) mixed with alcohol (judging by what one 'pharmicist' told me) - a tincture. This woman said that I shouldn't use it for the purpose of cleaning food utensils, and this put me off a bit, but I may have misinterpreted her reasons. She might simply have been trying to tell me that I was being foolish and that the supermarket had perfectly good detergents for that sort of thing! Or she might have imagined me just slopping the whole bottle undiluted onto my chinaware. Who knows? I actually did buy some (a bottle was about 40 cents), but I don't think I'll use it, as I really have no way of knowing if there is anything else in it, and from what you have said about ethanol , the dodgy rice spirit that it's undoubtedly dissolved in is not necessarily such a good thing either to be splashing about either.
Anyway, I will certainly arrange to get some shipped, but will keep looking in the meantime, as I'm eager to get going!
Thanks for all your advice
I'm glad you could find something. If in a pinch I think you could get away with using what you have on hand. It's common to have iodine in an alcohol solution for local sanitization in topical applications. Sorry to hear you're having such a difficult time. It's always nice to have a humbling reminder of how good we really have it here. Best luck to you, and please keep us posted as to how your Asian brewing experiance goes.
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