9
These are called swing-top bottles, and they're fine for re-use as long as they originally contained a carbonated drink like beer, and the glass has no chips or cracks. The usual advice regarding re-using commercial bottles applies here. First make sure they are clean, and then sanitize them before filling with delicious homebrew.
The easiest way to clean ...
7
You can pop one open now, and it's a good learning experience to keep drinking your beer regularly so that you can see how it develops. I know, tough life! And you'll probably find like I do that the beer is at it's peak when there's one or two bottles left.
8 days may not be enough time for all the CO2 in the headspace to dissolve back into the beer, so ...
6
Many people trade beer all the time.
It is legal, except via US Postal Service.
I think the laws around shipping via USPS are in flux, but without confirmation I'll suggest you stick to FedEx and UPS.
More info at:
http://www.reddit.com/r/beertrade/comments/atztu/trading_and_packaging_tips/
http://www.reddit.com/r/beer/comments/bf7lr/...
6
Don't worry about the foam, as far as I remember Charlie Tally, Head Chemist at 5 Star, has said that the starsan is broken down by the yeast. Also, when you fill the bottle most of the foam comes out as a "StarSan Worm", so there's relatively little left in the bottle.
If you've not had any problems with head in your beer then your existing methods are ...
6
"How safe would that beer be?"
If it's steam coming from a commercial appliance (presumably a dish-washer or some other such food-grade device) it wouldn't be any less safe than eating off a dish that came through it. What you might see is a small carry-over of that plastic-y scent into your beer from residuals left after draining. Unsafe? No. Inappropriate ...
6
This would be the final answer for me, but I left Evil Zymurgist's answer as accepted since he pointed me in the right direction.
I just wanted to let you know, in case anyone else could find this useful.
Hydrochloric acid alone worked perfectly, the bottle was put into it for less than 20 minutes, and after that it was rinsed with water (almost no ...
5
I take it from the title that you added the priming sugar and bottled the beer, then put it in the fridge?
If that's the case, you'll probably be OK. Just let the beer come up to room temperature and leave them alone for two weeks. Open one and see if it's carbonated. If it is, job well done. Relax and drink your beer.
Otherwise, the yeast was knocked back ...
5
There are two ways to get carbonated beer in bottles: natural conditioning, and force carbonation.
Natural conditioning is a process in which a small amount of fermentable sugar is added to the beer at bottling time. The yeast in the beer will ferment the sugar, adding carbon dioxide and a small amount of alcohol. Because the yeast become active to produce ...
5
It does sound like your priming sugar wasn't mixed very well. That said, if the flat bottles are sweet to the taste there's something else afoot.
When I bottle I usually mix a cup of water with 3/4 cup of corn sugar and stick it in the microwave for a couple minutes to boil it. I then let it cool for a while before pouring the solution into the bottom of ...
5
It's very much temperature dependent. In an episode of brewstrong, Charlie Bamforth mentions that the rate of oxidization is proportional to temperature, and increases 3 fold for each temperature increase of 10°C/18°F.
So, if your beer is stored at 4°C (39°F), it will oxidize 9 times slower than if it's stored at 24°C (75°F). Loosely speaking, if it takes ...
5
Depends on how well settled the sediment is to begin with. The key is to keep the bottles upright so that the surface of the liquid remains in the confined space in the neck. Assuming normal flat roadways, you should be fine.
How long it will take for the bottles to settle back down if they do get stirred up is subject to how stirred up they get and how ...
5
Here is a neat article about the Beer clarification process: Clarification of Beer: Advanced Brewing .
The article is about beer, but they derive a rough formula estimating it will take about 88 hours for yeast to settle 1 meter in beer. If the the yeast is only disturbed to a height of .1 meters is should take around 8 to 9 hours to settle. Cider is less ...
4
You can find viynl labels here BeerClings.com. They are reusable and work very well. Hope this helps.
4
Soak in StarSan.
Mix starsan as you would normally. Submerge bottles and soak for a day or so. Use a stainless steel scrubber (ball of stainless steel for cleaning pots/pans) to scrub off the paint.
I've done this on 100's of bottles. It's really effortless with the scrubber.
Side note I wouldn't recommend clear bottles for beer or anything hopped. (...
4
Bacteria like to hang out in soft surfaces like rubber and plastic, which for us usually includes things like buckets, hoses, and o-rings. Also any metal fittings for your valves, etc.
Glass bottles have none of these problems. You can safely clean and sanitize your bottles and reuse them for any kind of beer. If you are very concerned, the best way to ...
3
To build on what tobias said:
In both scenarios, if the beer is not crystal clear before bottling, the amount sediment in the bottles will be greater. You can reduce, but not eliminate, sediment in naturally conditioned beer by ensuring the beer is clear before bottling.
The more sediment you start with, the more you will end up with. There are several ...
3
It could be that there was an insufficient amount of active yeast in the beer when you bottled it. You could try this:
Uncap each bottle
Add two or three grains of dry yeast
Recap the bottles
Keep somewhere warm for a week or two.
The other possibility is that the alcohol percentage in the beer is high enough to kill any yeast. If the beer is above 10% ...
3
K-meta alone will not. You need the one-two punch of Potassium Sorbate (to prevent the yeast from reproducing) and Potassium metabisulfite (to kill existing cells). Note that this will take a bit of time, so you should expect to see a bit more of a gravity drop in the mean time. Using cold to slow yeast growth at the same time is advised.
3
It can be hard to see a thin ring of black mold in an amber bottle, even when holding it up against the light.
I'd strongly recommend you use a bottle washer on a faucet. Really hot water doesn't kill everything but it does tend to clean well. Here's one as an example:
http://morebeer.com/view_product/15964//Bottle_and_Carboy_Washer
I'd also recommend ...
3
You're doing something wrong.
I've broken exactly one 22 oz bottle in 10 years of homebrewing, probably due to overcarbonation, not opening mechanical stress.
(Also, if I broke glass anywhere near liquid, I would toss it all categorically. I can not fathom how you think opening a 12oz bottle of beer that splinters "everywhere" does not get "in the brew". ...
3
You won't be introducing that much oxygen by opening the fermentation bucket to simply take a gravity sample, unless you go stirring it up or something.
3
You should be fine. The results are really to lager strain dependent. That said, I have made several lagers that were great and ready to drink without a true lager phase. (Not to say they didn't get better as things went alone in the kegorator.)
You should really let your palate be your guide. If it tastes great but the process didn't go along according ...
2
Agreed with above poster. I made an American Amber ale with 4 whole vanilla beans added in secondary and bottled it. I tried one 2 weeks after bottling and their was a bitter taste I didnt expect and the vanila after taste was so pronounced as to make a negative impression. I thought I had wasted 5 gallons of beer. I waited another week and tried again, and ...
2
FedEx and UPS both require special alcohol shipping contracts that I assume are not available to consumers. USPS prohibits all alcohol shipments. However, you could just report the contents as "glassware" and I'm sure they would never know.
As for packaging, just use common sense. Glass bottles are not really that fragile — think about how they are stacked ...
2
The metallic/chemical taste to me suggests contamination at the bottle level. Maybe some of these were insufficiently cleaned or sterilized. The wrong microbes could also impact the flavor by breaking down the flavors you want into ones you don't. Is there any possibility you put more care into cleaning the longer bottles (as they would be possibly more ...
2
Sulfites don't actually kill yeast. They only inhibit it for a while. The yeast will eventually recover. Sulfites are used in winemaking to knock out the wild yeasts long enough so that the cultured yeast added by the winemaker eats up most of the sugar. So, when the wild yeasts recover, most of the sugar is gone and they end up contributing little or no ...
2
First, it's unnecessary, as you concluded, to do both of those things. Each individual step (dunk in sanitizing solution OR running through the dishwasher, sans detergent) effectively sanitizes the bottle, one by chemical, the other by heat. Sure, doing both is technically an extra-safe and cautious move, but pointless in my opinion. Neither is sterilizing, ...
2
You can also try storing the bottles upside down for a week or two. I have had great success with this in the past. I assume it has something to do with the smaller area for the yeast and sugar to settle. One side note, once carbonated you'll need to turn them back over to resettle or you'll have the yeast ring around the bottle mouth.
2
For fancy reusable labels you could try Grogtags.
With those you design it on their website then they print and ship to you.
Not a label maker, but its the only thing I could think of that's like what you described.
Most at home labelers are paper based.
2
I can suggest a small Zebra printer.
There are many models that can print on removable labels of 1" up to 4" wide. It usually comes with a software that allows you to design a label and print as many as you want (a roll will contain about 800 labels). The price would vary depending on the model (for about 200$ to 400$ you should get a good printer).
...
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