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I knew before giving birth that I would be going back to work when my baby girl was just a few months old, so I knew using baby bottles (we went with Dr. Brown’s anti-colic bottles) was going to be inevitable. This also meant that I would be cleaning bottles. In my Top 8 Baby Items in 2024 blog that can be found here, I talked about how one of the most useful items that my husband and I have used for our newborn is our Baby Breeza Sterilizer Machine. I’ll discuss the three primary methods available to clean your baby bottles below, and explain specifically why we chose to purchase a sterilizer machine.
The first option is to hand-wash the bottles with baby soap and a brush and then leave the bottles out to dry out on the counter. Before we wash the scrub the bottles down, we normally let them soak in a tub for a period of time first to help loosen up the milk in and around the bottle parts. I know plenty of moms who have only done this method and their babies have turned out to be just fine. The problem that this method posed for us, however, is that we have two cats that like to knock around small and lightweight objects, so the moment that they knew we were drying out baby bottle parts on the counter, we’d almost certainly come back with pieces missing when we would put the bottles back together (even if we leave them out on the counter – cats jump!). We also wanted an extra layer of cleaning done to the bottles for which I’ll explain the rationale below.
The second option is to rinse the bottles of excess milk/formula and then put them in the dishwasher for their own load and be washed with specific baby bottle detergent pods. We didn’t want to put the bottles in the dishwasher because we couldn’t know how well the bottles were being rinsed of detergent, etc. (with hand washing, you at least know exactly how well the bottles get rinsed), and I’ve our dishwasher leave detergent residue on dishes before after a dishwasher cycle (our dishwasher is admittedly older). That’s not what we wanted our baby’s milk to be mixed with! I’ll add though that I know a handful of moms that did this when their toddlers were bottle-drinking babies and their babies have also turned out to be just fine.
The third option is basically to hand wash exactly the way I described above, but instead of drying the bottle parts on the counter, you place the bottle parts in a sterilizer machine to run a cycle. This is the option that we ended doing for our bottles, despite it being an “extra step” in the process. As a working mom, I knew we would require child care, and everyone knows how notorious daycares are for being germ-infested. With teachers touching multiple bottles at a time whilst moving drooly kids around all while preparing your child’s bottle, the spread of germs is incessant and inevitable. This is the primary reason we bought the sterilizer – we’d be more confident in our bottles being free of any viruses or germs that the bottles pick up in daycare. Maybe we’re paranoid due to being first-time parents, but it did give us the peace of mind that we wanted with Covid, RSV, the Flu, and a number of other bacteria and viruses being ever and increasingly-present in daycares. Also, hand washing the bottles is 90-95% of the work anyways, so it’s not like it’s a ton of extra work to load the sterilizer and turn it on. Either way, if you hand wash you still have to set out the baby parts to dry on the counter – instead, we just set them in the sterilizer to have an extra layer of cleaning (and the sterilizer does an excellent job at drying them after they’re sterilized!) before we put the bottle parts back together. The only thing you need for the sterilizer is distilled water that can be found for very cheap at any grocery store. A video review showing how to actually use the sterilizer machine can be found here. Hint: It’s really easy!
I won’t say that there’s a right or wrong method for cleaning baby bottles. It’s something that practically all parents have to do nowadays, and fortunately for me, my husband takes care of 99% of the baby cleaning/sterilizing process (those husbands are the best types of husbands!). I will say that we feel the most comfortable with using bottles when we know they’ve been thoroughly cleaned, and ultimately that is what drove us to incorporating a sterilizer machine into our household!
The products I mentioned in the blog can be found here:
Baby Breeza Sterilizer Machine
Dr Browns Anti-Colic Baby Bottles (safe for sterilizer machines)
Baby Soap
Baby Bottle Brush
Baby Bottle Tub for Soaking
Baby Dishwasher Detergent Pods
Life of Les 
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