A couple days ago I filled and capped the 10,000th bottle of beer since I resumed brewing 5 1/2 years ago. I don’t even want to try to figure out how many hours of sanitizing & filling that entailed. And yes, it was worth every bit of effort it required.
Congratulations?
~10,000 bottles of beer on the wall, 10,000 bottles of beer…~
Congrats, that’s a lot of hard work! I doubt I made it to more than a few hundred before I said “Screw this, I’m buying some kegs”.
When this it true, the amount of time makes no difference at all.
Congrats on the milestone!
Out of curiosity, what kind of beer was it?
A milestone for sure, I’m around 1,500, 22oz bottles. Not sure I’ll ever reach 10,000, time will tell.
That’s a lot of bottling experience. It took several hundred before my grumbling stopped, now it’s no big deal.
Cheers !
All NAILs - of course ;D. Seriously though, everything from cream ale and semi-light lagers to 120 gravity monster beers - except for sour beers, cacn’t stand sour beer!
My problem with kegs is that I have 20 or 30 different beers on hand at any given time, would that I were wealthy enough to be able to have a walk-in cooler large enough for that many kegs, and a beer wall for all the taps. It took 2 or 3 thousand bottles before my capper was fully broken in.
Wow. I have 3-5 beers on hand at any one time: two kegs tapped, one conditioning, and possibly a cpl small 8-10 bottle batches in between.
Wow - congratulations! 
that’s a lot of bottles! I switched to kegs the first year I started brewing 7 years ago. Thats what kept me into brewing otherwise I would have quit because bottling got old quickly for me. The only thing I bottle now is mead for my wife and I’ll fill a PET bottle from a keg to give beer away to a friend. I usually have 3 kegs on tap and fermenting beer in a small refrigerator. Not being critical about bottling because many brewers only use bottles.
i would never end bottling, the oldest homebrew i made that i’ve tasted was some cider and a porter about 13 years after i had brewed them.
now that i’ve really got a lot of aspects down for quality, i like the idea of makig some beers that last and trying to keep them around for many years, something not really practical with kegs.
That’s is a good point about saving bottles! I would like to age kegged beer liked Barley Wines, Belgian Dark Strong Ales etc. But I would have to get another chest freezer. I could put one in my pole barn but I would have to heat the kegs in the winter.
Ha! I just meant what was in the 10,000th bottle. 
A beer I call Wyoming Common, years ago it started out as a Cal Common but eventually morphed into something entirely different, that one that put me ever 10K happened to be my 200th batch. It’s almost 50% Rye with maize, barley is well under 50% of the grist, and I don’t even use Cal lager yeast anymore, O.G. about 65 to 70 and ABV a bit over 7%.
It would be nice and a lot less work to keg some of my beers but that isn’t currently feasible. I have a lot of big beers that are several years old, most of which keep improving with age, and I like to keep a couple beers from the last of a batch of something I regularly make to compare to the next batch, especially when I make adjustments to a recipe, so I’ll have to keep bottling. And I really do like to have a lot of variety available cuz I never know what I’m gonna feel like drinking.