Given how fast I am at sanitizing bottles, the difference between 1 and 5 gallons is only a couple minutes.
Fill 5 gallon kettle half way with water/sanitizer. Take a bottle in each hand, dunk and let fill part way, cap ends with thumbs, shake, then put on bottle tree. Repeat. 5 minutes to sanitize enough bottles for 5 gallons. Twice as fast as the vinator and you don’t have another crappy piece of equipment to break and deal with. My vinator broke, never worked properly, was difficult to prime, would collect too much foam from pumping sanitizer into bottles…annoying.
All the hate for bottling is unjustified. The only thing to whine about bottling over kegging that is legitimate, in my opinion, is the possibility for bottle bombs and over/under carbonation. Everything else is a moot point (as much as I hate using that term).
I like your technique, beersk. Thanks for sharing.
Unfortunately, for me, I get things like spiders and centipedes that crawl into my bottles over time, paper, old yeast sediment, etc. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found things in my bottles that your technique would not have caught.
But would it work about 99% of the time? You betcha! Yeah, it could save me a lot of time. I’ll have to give this some more consideration…
I make sure to give the bottles I’m using a quick inspection before sanitizing. Otherwise, I see your point. Fortunately, I’ve never found any of that kinda crud in my bottles! HATE centipedes… They’re OH. SO. DISGUSTING.
I’ve got about 500 old bottles in a big crate in my basement.
Once I found a fully intact centipede in a partially consumed bottle of beer. The beer tasted just fine. So, I drank it anyway. I’m still alive. True story!
For me it takes just as long to keg a batch as it did to siphon beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket when I was bottling. Replace bottling bucket cleaning time with keg cleaning time.
Time saved = however long it took me to wash, bottle brush, rinse and sanitize every bottle, along with the actual filling/capping time.
I won’t say I’ll never do that again, but I will say that I don’t miss it.
Once you have bottles that are clean/delabeled, they store nicely upside down in a standard case box. We just dust off the bottom of the bottle and get them sanitized on bottling day.
I will also say, to each their own. I’m not going to say bottlers are wrong, that’s just silly. I would agree that the bottling process, like most processes in brewing can be examined and thought through to maximize efficiency. It does require the brewer to sit down and figure out exactly what needs to be done beforehand, and reflect on what gave him/her the most headaches during the previous session.
I am a committed bottler, but I really am missing out on the “cool” factor of having some nice Perlicks just waiting to be pulled. If I ever pour from the keg, this will be one of the reasons.
I don’t bottle much anymore, but I do spend a fair amount of time doing maintenance on all of the old kegs I have. You know, leaking poppets, leaking PRVs, leaking lids/O-rings. Those new kegs at the LHBS really are attractive, but I have too many kegs now!
I hear you there. I bought a bunch of used kegs from MoreBeer that were promptly returned. Their new Italian kegs are super nice. Expensive, yes. But super nice.
+1. I have a lot of kegs, too, and that does entail maintenance, for sure. There is a fair amount of work bottling or kegging, so I guess I just don’t mind the kegging work near as much.
Meh, this argument really has no bearing on the overall time spent packaging your beer. Bottling or kegging, like stated above, there’s a good amount of maintenance either way. Kegging has a lot more complicated maintenance, frustrating at times… It’s great for lagers and hoppy beers, definitely. This isn’t supposed to turn into a kegging vs. bottling thing, I don’t think. Just saying, each has their place and I very much disagree that kegging saves time over bottling. On packaging day, yes, but overall, I’d argue they’re fairly similar in time spent.
And “cleaning and/or scrubbing bottles” is totally unnecessary, especially if you rinse them well after pouring and store them upside down.
Anyway, each has their place. I have a bit of frustration with my used kegs and getting a good seal on them for the 3.5 to 4 gallons that gets kegged. Sometimes I’ll have beers carbonate mostly in a week and sometimes they’re still kinda flat… It can be frustrating. Seems like there’s always something. I’m sure the pros go through this crap too.
I normally do 6 gallon batches. I did a 3 gallon on my equipment recently. Two major differences. First, my efficiency went from 79-80% normally to 71%. Not sure why, actually. I did use a base malt I have never used before. Second, the mash lost heat faster than I am used to. It dropped 5F over an hour. I think this was because there was so much empty space in my 10 gallon Rubbermaid cooler during the mash. My FG was 1005 which was dryer than I expected. I think that was from the quick dropping temp. The mash started at 150F.
But, I want to move to 3 gallon (or less). I can’t keep up with 6 gallon batches with out constantly finding ways to give away beer.
In summary, this was a learning experience and I will get a handle on the new process over a few batches.
