Home Brew Bottling questions

[jmatkins]

OK I have a few questions about bottling.

I have always kept my bottle camps and tossed them when they overflow. Can I use them to recap my bottles or is it better to use new caps?

Also I see these New Castle mini Kegs, could I somehow refill that and save on bottles?

Thanks!

John

 

[smokinghole]

I never reuse caps. They're cheap enough plus it's tough to get a good seal on a previously sealed cap. Think of it in terms of reloading you'd have to resize the caps to get them to work again.

Now the mini kegs. I think there are some that you can fill and reuse I don't know about the commercial brewery deals. I never looked at them closely but you can get mini kegs and prime them with the small co2 cartridges.

 

[derfatdutchman]

I use new caps every batch. Plain janes for beers that don't need allot of bottle ageing, and the O2 absorbing ones for beer that needs longer bottle time.

As for the mini-kegs check out the homebrewers forums, allot of people have been experimenting on reusing them.

 

[smokinghole]

Once I have the ability to start doing oxygen saturation testing of liquids I'd like to do a side by side comparison of a beer bottled with O2 absorbing caps and one with out. Hmmm I wonder if they're a waste of money or not?

 

[derfatdutchman]

Smokinghole that's sounds like a good experiment. Always figured that it couldn't hurt to use the O2 absorbing caps, but I've wondered too if they really work. I know once I've opened the package I toss the rest of the pack in with my regular caps.

 

[smokinghole]

Yeah I have O2 absorbing (if not I'll pick some up) and regular caps I think. Next thing I bottle I'll do half and half just to see what happens. I doing a biotech degree right now and my internship next semester is looking like Appalachian Brewing Company. I'll be doing O2 testing and other things for them at the school laboratory. So I'm sure I can sneak in some personal testing.

Also from what I read the O2 caps are moisture activated. So if you sanitize them just before putting on the bottle you just activated them. As long as they stay dry then they'll still work. I supposed the best use of them is don't sanitize them and then invert the bottle to activate the 02 absorbing layer.