Removing Labels From Harpoon Beer Bottles
I am getting ready to brew some beer as soon as I get my tax return. I have been getting all my equipment cleaned and sanitized since it has been in storage for a while due to lack of funds to buy ingredients. I have been building up a small collection of Harpoon beer bottles. Since I needed to get the labels off the bottles I first tried the trick my friend and I have used in the past of boiling them off. It only kind of worked….
What I ended up doing was using an old ceramic coated pot that I had sitting around. It happens to be slighter deeper than the height of the bottles. I don’t use it for brewing since I burned off some of the ceramic at one point, and I don’t want to risk any contamination of my beer. I filled all the beer bottles with water to keep them sitting in the pot and not floating. Then I put in 2 big spoonfuls of 1-step and added hot water from the sink. You may want to make sure the water you put in the bottles is either hot or at least warm so you don’t crack the glass. I filled the pot until the depth of the water with sanitizer was up to just under the lip of the bottles. Then I let it sit for a few hours. At that point some of the labels on the bottles I didn’t try boiling had fallen off by themselves. I then poured the water out of each bottle and rinsed them off in the sink and just brushed off the glue/paper residue with my hands. I now have a bunch of perfectly clean bottles with no glue or paper residue on them.