What are your top 3 bottling tips (other than switch to kegging ;))?
Any thoughts about the vinator?
And, have you ever gotten an infected beer from tap water coming in contact with your beer during bottling or some other time? In other words, do you think the # 1 cause of infected beer is tap water as it mentions in the article?
Clean the bottles really well. Place AL foil over the necks, crimp foil on. Bake in the oven at 375F for an hour. Turn oven off and let bottles cool in place. Take out when cool and put in your storage, don’t disturb the foil. When ready for use whenever you want to bottle, those are sterile and ready to go.
Every time I put my PET bottles in the oven, they melt. ;D
But seriously, I’ve always been nervous about the oven technique as, reportedly, the glass will weaken over time, potentially leading to bottle bombs. Any advice on how many times you would bake the glass before getting a new set of bottles? Or do you think this is not a problem?
I had a vinator, it broke. I like filling my 5 gallon kettle up halfway with sanitizer, dunking 2 bottles at a time (filling a quarter full maybe), putting my thumb over the end and shaking, dumping, put on bottle tree, repeat. It’s twice as fast as the vinator and the outside of your bottle gets sanitized as well. And always, always, always, triple rinse (shaking vigorously) the bottles after you pour a beer.
When I bottled, I liked using the vinator in combination with a bottle tree. You can sanitize a whole run of bottles for a 5 gallon batch in a few minutes.
So I read the ‘prime pump method’ from the comment above… Assuming there are no other problems with that technique, one issue I see is that the spray bottle distributes a specific amount of sugar every time at the same store-bought, pre-mixed concentration (whatever amount is in a given brand of simple sugar mix). This is good for consistency (all beers come out at exactly the same amount of carbonation), but bad for matching the appropriate level of carbonation to whatever beer style.
In other words, if the level of carbonation is an important part of beer, like hops or some other component, then it seems we may want to add the appropriate level of carbonation to a given beer, just as we might with hops.
For example, if I told you that the amount of hops you want to add to every style of beer is 4 oz in a 5 gallon batch, that might make you a pretty good beer every time. One size fits all. However, if we really wanted to be accurate about the style of beer we were making (Imperial IPA, Berliner Weisse, etc), you may need to add more or less hops to brew a good example of the style.
Accordingly, every style of beer requires a certain level of carbonation. For instance, German Hefeweizen, Lambic, and Saison call for about 4 volumes of CO2 (possibly more), whereas English Bitters should be carbonated to about 1 volume. In order to achieve a specific amount of carbonation, you’re probably better off measuring and mixing up your own priming sugar yourself. How you would adapt a spray bottle to spray out the desired amount into every bottle is probably solvable (dilute or concentrate the store-bought sugar mix to distribute the appropriate amount per spray), but I’m guessing not as practical as measuring your own priming sugar according to the style of beer you’re making and mixing it in to the entire volume of beer you wish to prime.
For me, I still think using an online priming sugar calculator (which also will give you the recommended level of carbonation per beer style), and adding that to the volume of beer being primed is the best way to go when bottle priming.
Unless I overlooked it, the priming sugar should be added to a small amount of water and boiled for a few minutes before adding to the beer. This will help ensure complete and proper distribution of the priming sugar in the beer.
You also want to be sure it is mixed in well, as it tends to stratify and you end up with uneven carbonation. I add mine during racking once there’s about an inch if beer in the bottling bucket. The swirling motion of the incoming beer mixes the sugar in fairly well. I still always give a couple of gentle stirs with a sanitized spoon at the end, just to be sure.
For me, I’ll bottle from keg for comps or to give away. And sometimes to make room for another beer on tap, I’ll bottle a partial keg. But otherwise, kegs all the way.
No, you don’t buy the priming syrup, you make your own. I find that a simple syrup with a ratio of 1 gram of table sugar to 2 ml of water (final volume) works great in my spray bottle/bottle injector and allows me to bottle a wide range of carbonation levels (as shown in the chart).
And the pump prime method is faster and eliminates the need to buy, clean and store a bottling bucket.
I think your spray bottle method is pretty cool, and I see the benefits you mentioned. I have to go along with the other post about fine tuning CO2 volumes though. CO2 volume is a big contributer to everything else in a beer, even appearance. Being able to precisely dial that it, not just to style, but even to one specific beer, is pretty vital if you are striving to get a beer from Very Good to Excellent or World Class. All things being equal, a small change in carbonation can make a noticeable difference between two otherwise identical beers. Same as final pH, same as mineral content, same as ingredient freshness, bla bla bla. So, imagine the brewer who weighs his grain to the ounce, hops to the gram, and measures ph to the second decimal point, but then ballparks his CO2 volume to within about a half of a volume… The beer may be awesome, but not exactly the same each time. Therefore not exactly at its best every time.
Cool idea that works, just hard to be very precise.
The pump prime method should be as precise as the bottling bucket method, assuming a quality spray bottle. I’ve tested mine dozens of times and it puts out exactly 1.5 ml/pump on average over the 3-4 pumps/bottle primed. I get exactly 6 ml in four pumps. Therefore, using a priming sugar calculator, you can tweek the priming syrup recipe to zero in on the precise carbonation volumes desired.
Edit: It’s not the exact amount/pump that is important but rather the precise repeatability of the amount /pump that is important.
Caveat: I bought the spray bottle I use for priming a LHBS and it is much better quality than the ones that I bought at Ace Hardware. Those became cleaning and sanitizing sprayers.
I used to bottle off the keg, but I quit doing that a couple of years ago. I do fill an occasional growler when I want to take beer somewhere, like a club meeting. I pretty much have given up on entering competitions…after winning gold at the NHC in 2011, it seemed like I had reached my peak.
