Trick To Get Painted Labels Off Bottles

See an empty bottle and think, “Wait don’t throw that out, I can use that for my homebrew!”, welcome to the world of homerbewing.  When homebrewing you can reuse bottles that are pop top for bottling your own beer.  So that really means going out and buying some craft beer is just an, “investment” into the hobby because you can keep your beer bottles that you drank.

Sometimes though you want to make your beer bottles look like they are uniformed, you don’t want to see the old labels.  Paper labels are easy enough to take off, soak them in some PBW and just go to town on them. Also make sure that the water being used is very hot – it makes life a lot easier.  The real question is how do you get off painted labels off.   You know, the type where the label is directly painted onto the bottle.  An example of this would be, “Stone – Arrogant Bastard”.

The way to take off the paint so it doesn’t look like you are drinking a stone beer is, take a normal concentration of StarSan and water (1 oz of Starsan to 5 gallons of water), and put your bottle in a bucket of that.  Let the bottle sit overnight, then most of the time you can just use the back-end of a kitchen scrubber   Some people have claimed that a paper towel can be used and just wipe it off, others say that you need, “steel wool” in order to really get it off.  Either way, it’s gonna come off.  Honestly it’s just that easy: 1) Put beer bottle in bucket 2) Add normal concentration of water and StarSan 3) Let it sit over night 4) Scrub.

This is a nice way to get the bottle labels off with minimal effort.  Yes of course you could just tell your friends, “No, that’s not Arrogant Bastard – it’s a stout I made”, but this trick is one if you want to bring your presentation up to the next level.   This trick can be especially useful for those that are part of a homebrew club and need to put a label on their beer bottle, or just someone who gets a lot of their beer bottles from their other hobby, drinking craft beer.

If you have other tips on how to take off labels leave it in the comment section below and as always,

Cheers,

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