Hooray, I finally got my Star San sanitizer from my homebrew supplier! Well, this is the second attempt to get the Star San. My supplier delivered wrongly to me for the first time (he gave me Iodophor) and he later said that he will send the Star San to me by snail mail. I guess I am not that lucky, I got another bottle of Iodophor instead. And just the beginning of this week the supplier finally sent the correct bottle to me, as you can see from the photo above. Hahaha, nothing will stand between me and my Star San!

The reason why I am very keen to use Star San instead of Iodophor is because I am very afraid of staining. Iodophor is actually iodine, so when in contact with plastics, it may stain it and that’s going to be very difficult to remove. I don’t want my plastic fermenter, stirring spoon and bottles to have stains on them. And although I don’t smell any iodine smell in the Iodophor and it is supposed to be a no-rinse sanitizer, I still find it rather uncomfortable when using it to sanitize my equipment. So I will normally rinse the equipment first. For Star San, I would say I feel much better to use it as my sanitizer of choice.

And that little bottle is going to last for some time. All you need is about 1/4 cupful of Star San and mix with 500ml of clean water to do your sanitizing. Best of all, you can re-use the sanitize if it doesn’t become dirty. Normally, what brewers would do is to use a spray bottle and spray the solution on the surface of their brewing equipment. For bottles, they would use a “water blaster“. It is sort of like a fountain where you insert the bottles to the nose of the blaster and squeeze the sanitizing solution into beer bottles. This way, you will be able to cover all the interior surface of the bottles. And it works much faster than using a spray bottle and trying to get the solution into the beer bottle.

Well, I have already brewed one batch last week, so this came a little too late. But hey, there will be always more brews to do.