How to Clean Baby Bottles

Since young children and infants are at an increased risk for food poisoning, learning the basics of baby bottle safety is important to keeping your infant protected. Bottles are an important part of a baby's nourishment during the first year of life, so make sure your little one's bottles are always washed properly.

make sure your little one's bottles are always washed properly.

Even if you use disposable plastic bottle liners and ready-to-use formula, you still need to make sure the bottles and nipples are clean. Additionally, washing and drying in a dishwasher is safe, but only with heated water and a hot drying cycle. Depending on what kind of bottles you use, some brands (like Dr. Brown's) have several parts that need to be taken out of the bottle and taken apart for washing.

What is the Best baby bottle brush?
The trickiest part of bottle feeding is probably clean up, at least it is for me.  Thats the one im using now & it is really hard to get it into the bottle.  I hurt my hand almost every time.  Bottles and their nipples come in all shapes and sizes, and that standard giant round brush is not the one size clean all it claims to be.

You still need a bottle brush to get off any milk proteins that cling inside the bottle (that's what makes bottles stain if juice is put in after milk), but for the nipples, I just always turned them inside out to clean, putting them inside a net bag on the top rack of the dishwasher.

It may sound odd, but I don't believe bottle brushes are ever good. Instead, get a soft sponge, or a washcloth, use a spoon to push it in the bottom and all around, taking care that the hard parts do not rub against the plastic or glass. For nipples, wash them by hand literally and stick your finger into the nipple part, that will get it cleaner than anything else.

Every bottle brush I've tried scratches the bottles and rarely gets them very clean. I use a scotch sponge, they're thick. One side is scratchy, the other side is very soft though, so I wedge a spoon against the scratchy side and push the soft side against the bottle. It gets them very very clean from what I can tell, and the scratchy side makes it so the spoon doesn't slip.

Add: That's why we use the spoon to push it down, it effectively puts it on a handle without physically putting it on a handle. The benefit? You can wash the sponge, microwave it, disinfect it. Double benefit? My bottles still look new.

Top Baby Bottle Pick
 
OXO Tot Bottle Brush with Nipple Cleaner and Stand $11.08
This is by far the best bottle brush out there and I think I tried them all before this one! Let me tell you that any bottle brush with some sort of sponge attached will come apart. This works in everything that I have tried including the Medela breat pump bottles and the inner parts & nipple of a dr. browns.

Baby Bottle Spinning Cleaning Sponge Brush Pigeon (Made in Japan) $10.48
These are the best baby bottle "brushes" there are out there. They're not really brushes, but soft sponges (one softer sponge and one more coarse scrubbier one)folded and clamped together. They clean your bottles much more thoroughly and don't scratch like those regular bottle brushes you get from those baby stores. When you have to wash a lot of baby bottles, you'll appreciate a nice bottle brush like this and the funny spinning angled handle helps you get the job done a lot faster than those straight ones!