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How to Get Rid of the Annoying Soured (or Mildewed) Smell in Clothes

Add (original) Listerine to the wash in warm water. A half cup or so will do it. The clothes come out without the soured stink but they do smell a little like Listerine. It dissipates fairly quickly but you can always rinse or wash them again. You may want to do that for the sake of the washer, so that the next load doesn't have a faint odor. (My girlfriend can smell a jar of unopened bad perfume in someone's medicine cabinet across the street, so obviously I have to do that for her.)

I came up with this all on my own in an odd way. I had some stinky sheets (bachelor pad, left sheets in washer, forgot them for two days) and needed to deodorize them. Chlorine bleach works to some extent, but I'd gotten tired of faded, partially dissolved laundry by then. Now as it happens, I had a small jar of thymol lying around (doesn't everyone?) and I thought, okay, here's a fine and kind of medicinal smelling disinfectant, let me try a bit. So I added a teaspoon or so to the wash, and when the clothes came out of the dryer, no more reek!

Well, later on, I didn't happen to have any more thymol, but I tried Listerine, which is thymol-based, and lo and behold it works great.

One of the great things about this is that it will not damage your clothing. Thymol is also a good disinfectant, so if you're looking for an alternative that is almost as good as bleach (chlorine bleach really is the shit for disinfecting - there is no effective microbial resistance to anything higher than very low levels of it), but not as tough on your clothing, give it a try. I use this to disinfect synthetic clothing, like when the cat dragged a live rat inside and I found droppings in a pile of laundry the next day ....