Rack 'em up

I had a busy beer weekend that was long overdue. I bottled my ESB and transfered the three other batches to secondaries.

That took a lot of busy work.

By bottling my ESB I had an empty carboy (remember my beer lineup). I borrowed a friends 5-gallon carboy which I used to hold my sanitizing solution so I could use it for all three carboys.

The process went something like this: I emptied the ESB carboy, cleaned it and added the sanitizing solution. After a bit of a soak, I transfered the sanitation solution to the borrowed carboy and racked the next beer to the freshly sanitized carboy. I repeated this process two more times.

I used Star-San as my sanitizing solution. According to the MSDS, Star-San is 50% phosphoric acid (H₃PO₄), 15% dodecylbenzene sulfonic acid (see below) and 10% isopropyl alcohol (the remainder is a secret, though the majority is probably water).

I presume the phosphoric acid and IPA kill anything living in my carboy and the dodecylbenzene sulfonic acid acts as a detergent.