Flourescent lights and homebrew.

[Asahikun]

I'm wondering how sensitive homebrew is to flourescent lights.
I've been putting aside 4 or 5 300ml bottles of every batch recently and I plan to take them to work to give to my colleagues as Christmas presents. I'm going to leave a case on a desk so that everyone can choose which style they'd like to try. This means the case will be sitting in a brightly lit office for a day or two. Will this have any effect on the beer?
(They are all brown bottles).

[GunNut76]

It shouldn't. The flavor of beer is affected by UV light and IIRC flourecent lights don't have much UV (but I could be wrong) anyway the brown bottles are the best assurence against light struck beer...stay away from green and clear! Anyone know if colbalt blue bottles are like brown ones in their resistance to UV?

[paul84043]

THe blue bottles are not as good as brown, they will pass more UV.
I was always under the impression that fluorescent lights were loaded with UV, like the lights at a tanning salon...(I know they're specialized)
Another consideration with fluorescent is the "force" or energy behing the charged particles being generated. Fluorescent lights are driven by a high voltage transformer exciting the gas stored within the tube, the higher the voltage, the longer the tube, the more force, or energy behind the emitted particles, only a small portion of which is visible light. (the faster they are travelling)
They actually emit radiation across the entire spectrum, much moreso than an incandescent bulb does.

Where I work we manufactur X-Ray tubes, it's in interesting field with many different aspects. One interesting effect X-ray radiatioin has it that it tends to "brown" or darken objects be it glass, metal, plastic, whatever is exposed to the radiation.
We had one engineer that used to go out into the Utah desert and find clear Topaz. Of course, clear Topaz isn't really desirable and not worth much, but he would place them in the beam of a tube for several days and they would turn a very nice brown color. Then he could sell them for a tidy profit.

Anyway, to make a short story long, I had a piece of leaded glass that was sitting in the beam for several weeks, we were taking video and needed to block the radiation so that it would not destroy our video camera. you would be amazed at the damage radiation will do over a period of time...
I took the piece of glass out after the test was complete and put it on a shelf exposed to the fluorescent lights. I forgot about it for a week or so and when I looked at it I noticed that the x-ray brown was almost gone....after two more weeks, the glass was clear again.
I asked one of the engineers about it and he told me that it was the high energy particles emitted by the fluorescent lights that stripped the color back out of the glass....weird....
You're run of the mill flourescent tubes are actually very powerful. They also strip all kinds of stuff out of our bodies if you sit under them day after day. It's like a low power, long term x-ray...the same goes for sitting in front of a CRT monitor. The bigger the tube, the higher the voltage required to drive it and the more radiation you're getting on a constant basis. (A very good excuse to buy an LCD monitor)
Sorry for the tangent, but I don't allow my beer anywhere near a fluorescent light source.
You should be fine if you have them in a box and keep a lid over them though. Be sure to tell your friends to keep them out of the light as well....

Also keep in mind, as in all forms of radiation, the power is a function of the distance squared...for every unit of measure closer, the radiation is increased by the square of the vlaue, farther away, it's reduced by the square root. (I can't remember the standard unit of measure, but it reallly doesn't matter...)
Farther away is better.

[Asahikun]

Thanks for the replies. My instinct was that it probably wasn't too good to leave it uncovered under those bright office lights.
I'll make sure to put on a cover.