How to Recycle & Clean Kombucha Bottles

by Creative Moments

5 Materials

1 Hour

Easy

I am loving my new found beverage making hobby. I love making kombucha, water and milk kefirs and lemonade. I have tried ginger bug sodas and tepache as well.

Making fermented beverages requires bottles and these can be pricey to purchase new. After buying a case of cobalt blue glass ones ($50/12) I was ok with looking for other more economical choices as it seems I am on a real roll and need loads of bottles. Let me share what I found and how I cleaned them.

The most economical way is to hit up your bottle recycling depot and ask for kombucha bottles as well as green Grolsch beer bottles. They have the same flip top lids as the ones I purchased. (They are also way easier to clean labels off of)

First step I did was soak the bottles with lids off in hot soapy water to do a first clean. Some of the labels loosened right up and were easy to peel off, others like this one were super sticky.

After soaking in the hot water and peeling layers of the labels off I used a handy scrub brush flat edge to loosen the last layer.

The very best goo remover is this product, an orange oil cleaner. I put it in a small spray bottle to make it easy to apply.

Then rub, added water and most literally rubs off. The final step was to use a scotch brite pad and the jar is all clean.

Once all were clean they were soaked in another hot water bath this time with household bleach for an hour then ran thru the sanitize cycle of my dishwasher.

Here are the green beer bottles next to my pricey blue glass purchased ones.

The reused kombucha bottles are easy to write on with a sharpie, I usually add the date made too and all washes off when emptied. These size bottles also allow bigger pieces of fruit to be used. I love the variety of bottles to have on hand.