Last September Jean and I collected Hawthorn berries. Okay, honestly, Jean did most of the collecting, scampering down the steep side of the roadside hill. I missed the opportunity to post the tincture and jelly making and I will do that when we get closer to fall this year.
This post however is about bottle cleaning. The tinctures have been sitting for about four months now and I took them out the other day and discovered that there had been some settling. You can see that in the bottles below.
I slowly poured out the clear tincture and once the cloudy part got to the neck, the rest was poured into a sieve lined with a coffee filter and left to drip.
While I understand that an option would be to dispose of the bottle, I do try to keep some interestingly shaped ones around as they make for better pictures.
Three bottles were just fine but the fourth was not going to come clean easily.
I was able to get the sides clean with a long match. I wrapped a small amount of paper towel around the non match end and secured it with a rubber band. I could get through the small opening at the neck. That however did not resolve the top most section. The angle was all wrong and a toothpick didn’t work either.
To my rescue came my stepmother, who suggested something her mother had used for finicky bottles.
Eggshells!
Make sure they are very finely chopped as once in the bottle they still need to come out again. I put about and inch of shells in the bottpm of the bottle and filled the rest of the bottle with water to about 3/4’s full and shook….and shook.
It was not immediate. How long you will have to shake depends on what is stuck inside but in a reasonable amount of time, if you really want to keep the bottle, IT WORKS!
Cleaning Bottles from My Kitchen Wand
