Food Grade Buckets
Most Home Brewers have a couple of food-grade buckets around the brewery. Buckets are often used as fermenters, priming the wort with sugar at bottling, and to make sanitizer.
Helpful Hint - Avoid Scratches!: The only downside to using buckets is that they are easy to scratch. Once scratched, microorganisms can hide in the grooves and contaminate future brews. If you are using plastic buckets for fermentation, we recommend the following:
- Only use soft cloth or soft scrub pads to clean the bucket (never steel wool!)
- Use a 2-step cleaning process: first soak in a hot/warm solution of an alkaline-based cleaner like PBW to chemically breakdown the organic matter (no scrubbing necessary), rinse with hot/warm water, then follow with an acid-based sanitizer rinse using Star-San or SaniClean. Note: MoreBeer!'s buckets are food grade up to 180F.
