What’s brown, made of glass & filled with homebrew?

…the answer of course is a beer bottle. But let’s take a moment to think about what a beer bottle is. It’s a container for 12 oz. of liquid. Simple enough (no duh, is what you’re all saying). But when you consider that for a 5 gallon batch of beer, you need around 48 bottles of that size to hold all of your beer, you start to think of beer bottles a lot. Where to get them, where to keep them, how to clean them, how to fill them. For one thing, you can buy new ones, but that seems like a waste of money when there are plenty of bottles out there….with beer already in them!! All you need to do is buy beer in good quality bottles and drink the beer. Again, simple enough. Except when you go to the store, there are dozens of styles of bottles. Tall ones, short ones, bottles with raised logos, and lets not forget the ones with twist off caps (in fact, lets forget them all together since they won’t work for what we need). So, after selecting a six-pack of fine brew, in a nondescript, tall, slender bottle (Mendocino Brewery Red Tail Ale, it’s yummy!) I headed home to begin “reclaiming” some beer bottles for home brew use. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t drink beer as fast as I can open it. A six pack will last me about a week. I’ll have a beer with dinner occasionally and I usually have one when I’m watching a baseball game (ok, maybe I’ll have 2 or 3 but who’s counting), but I won’t just sit and drink to excess and certainly not to empty out bottles I intend to “reclaim”. So the process of “reclaiming” 48 bottles has been time consuming. Add to that the fact (as previously pointed out) that there are many different styles of bottles. Well, since I’ve already told you in a previous blog that I over-prepare, I should also tell you that I am a bit of a picky person when it comes to aesthetics. I want to make sure that my beer ends up in a bottle that reflects the proper style. For example; Pale Ale, I think, should go in a tall, slender bottle. California Common should go in a short, smooth sided bottle. So now I’m faced with the dilemma of needing 48 beer bottles for each style of beer I plan on brewing. For now, I’ll just plan on brewing only one style.

Now to address the issue of cleaning all those bottles. Luckily I’ve had a bit of help on that matter (thanks go out to James Spencer from Basic Brewing Radio). If you rinse out your bottles immediately after you pour the beer out of them, you’ve done half the work. All that’s left to do is to remove the labels and sterilize them before putting homebrew in them. Removing the labels is really easy. Soak the bottles in hot, soapy water for about 15-20 minutes, peal off the label, allow the bottle to soak for a few more minutes, then use a scouring pad to remove the sticky residue, rinse well and you have label-free bottles that are also nice and clean. A big shout out to Sierra Nevada for not using industrial strength glue on their labels (Firestone Walker on the other hand uses glue that should be able to hold two trains together). I can also share a simple solution for storing all these bottles. I just asked my local liquor store if they had any empty beer boxes left over. They happily handed me several. Each box holds 4 six packs or 24 bottles, so all I need is two boxes to hold a 5 gallon batch of beer bottles. Of course, I have the added problem of having plenty of bottles but nothing to put in them……for now.