I know lots of you use ultrasonic cleaners or boil your bottles but if that's too much effort for you, go to your local homebrew store!
Most homebrews sell a one step sanitizer- 1tbs to 1L (quart) of water, soak bottles for 30 seconds or more and then put on a (sanitized) rack to dry.
It's completely food safe, degrades into water over time (if you don't fully dry you bottles), costs $5 or so for 50L of sanitizer and is super painless. Once your bottles are dry you are good to go!
http://www.ecologiccleansers.com/one-step.php
This is the sanitizer I use. pH based sanitizers like Starsan (as suggested elsewhere) will completely destroy plastics and rubber.
Ok - so most of the sanitizers available in home brew supply stores do so by throwing the PH so far out of whack no life can be sustained on the surface of the glass (or whatever material you're sanitizing). They're rated as safe because once the liquid (wort, beer, 'tevs) is added they are so diluted they can't possibly harm your digestive system. Other sanitizers use iodine...
A few points of note:
- We diluting a smaller surface area in to a smaller volume
- your lungs aren't your digestive tract
- do we have any evidence that non-sterile bottles cause any problems we need to fix?
I don't have the information, nor have I done the math to say sterilizing would be a problem... but if nothing else it's likely unecesarry. PG and VG are hygroscopic... what are we worried about growing in there anyway?
Also - caustics are a pain in the ass - take a lazy hombrewer tip and use the sanitize feature on your dishwasher.
> * your lungs aren't your digestive tract
To be fair the same argument could be used against every and all of the flavors we use in our eliquid. They are all FDA approved for use as a food additive but for inhalation they haven't been tested for safety let alone proven to be safe.
Can you tell me what it's called? I'm trying to find something like that on amazon but everything I see is +$20.
Been doing some more reading. Star San is strictly a sanitizer and is acid based. One Stop is not a certified sanitizer as defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Neither are sterilizers.
Sanitizing, often done using chemicals, removes most micro-organisms from your equipment. “Most” being the key word.
Sterilizing goes one step further than sanitizing. This is a process used to remove all micro-organisms. Nothing survives sterilization. Not yeast, bacteria, or fungus.