Sterilising Equipment

[AndyRVTR]

Hi all, at the moment, being fairly new to winemaking, I use Youngs U Brew sterilising powder, and although it does the job, at £1.75 for a 100g tub, it works out pretty expensive.
While looking on Wilko's website, I came across Milton sterilising tablets, a pack of 28 for £1.71, would it be ok to use these instead of the Youngs powder??

 

[Runwell-Steve]

There are a number of options.

Unless you have an autoclave you are not really sterilising, just sanitising, there is a difference. All the so called serilisers you can buy are only really sanitisers, i.e. they remove/kill the bacteria to an acceptable level, rather than sterilising which is removing/killing ALL bacteria.

Bleach is a perfectly good sanitiser, you can dilute that and wash everthing in bleach, the only downside is the amount of rinsing you need to do to get rid of the smell.

There are some no rinse sanitisers around, persoanlly I use Starsan, you mix that at a ratio of 1.5ml starsan to every 1 litre of water so it lasts a very long time. You can reuse it, and as it's no rinse you don't need to worry about rinsing anything.
There are other no rinse sanitisers that other people use including videne, and peracetic acid.

These are all sanitisers though so you still need a cleaner, OxyClean, available in tubs from your local german supermarket/pound shop is ideal, and cheap.

 

[Moley]

In my opinion, the Young's cleaner & steriliser powder is the mutt's nuts for heavily soiled glassware such as demijohns.

For light soiling I use soapy water and bottle brushes or the oxy cleaners Steve mentioned.

Milton tablets seem quite expensive to me, for general sanitising after cleaning you can use the Milton fluid or the far cheaper supermarkets' own brand equivalents, or their ‘value’ thin bleaches. In both cases use at around 15-20ml to the litre of water with a 20-30 minute contact time, and then rinse well.

If you are using a lot of sanitising / disinfecting solution, then I would recommend Videne. Typically £6 - £8 for a 500ml bottle by mail order or on special order from your local pharmacy, but that goes a long way and the made-up solution only works out at around tuppence a litre.