Capping or Corking

There are several kinds of bottles and several kinds of ways to seal it. I’ve only worked with beer and wine bottles so far, so I’ll talk about those.

For home brewing of beer and cider, beer bottles work just fine, but they should not be screw type openings for capping. Bottling them is as fairly simple. A couple of caps are boiled to sanitize them, and possibly even make the rubber ring in them swell to make a better seal. The caps should be allowed to cool so that they can be handled without being hurt. My husband got a capper in which a magnet holds the cap. It is then set on the bottle, and the two levers crimp it down on the bottle. Fairly simple.

For wine bottles, there are corks. The method is similar, where you boil some corks and then use a corker to force the cork inside the bottle. The cheapest corker runs a little less than $10, where you load the cork into a chute, place it on the bottle, and then use a rubber mallet to get the cork into the bottle. This did not sound ideal for me.

The guy who let me try his homemade mead actually grew up on his family’s vineyard and winery, and he told me not to go buy the $20 corker, and yet that is what I did. It mimics the industrial corkers in that you use two levers to compress the cork, and then a third lever to force the cork into the bottle. He warned me that it would take two people, but sometimes I find that I can do it myself.

There was a third variety offered to me that was about $30, and it was a double leaver corker that worked a little more sophisticated than the rubber mallet method. I didn’t care for that kind, and the store clerk didn’t think too highly of it, either.

Once I had decided on a corker, it was time for me to buy cork. Low and behold, they were out of real corks, and only had plastic corks. If given the choice, I wouldn’t have bought the plastic ones because real cork is biodegradable. However, I have to say that the plastic ones are growing on me. The biggest pro I see to them is that they don’t require the bottle to be laid on its side to keep the cork wet. If there is still fermentation going on and the buildup of CO2, corks can be forced out. I would think that a bottle stored standing up would create less of a mess than a bottle laid on its side. Plastic corks also seem fairly easy to cork by myself after I got the hang of it.

There are other kinds of closures, such as the champagne mushroom cork held down with wire. I suggest consulting books and your local supply store to see if you want to work with an alternative method.

It is also recommended that when you are capping or corking to boil a few more than what you will need in case something goes wrong – you drop them, they break, refuse to work, bend funny, etc.

Someday, if I really do open a winery, I’ll have to buy the Floor Corker Machine, which will cost me about $125, but I would think it would be easier on your hands to use.

Bottling

In my last post, I said that when the must clears, there is another layer of lees, and the airlock stops bubbling, that it is time to bottle. However, before bottling a batch, test it first with the hydrometer to make sure all the sugar is gone. If there is some present and the yeast continue to work on it in a bottle, the pressure from the released CO2 could cause the bottle to explode. I also rack one more time minutes before bottling so that I don’t have to worry about sucking up lees when bottling. Using a hydrometer, a batch is ready to be bottled if it is 1.005 or less. If it is ready, it needs to be chemically treated to ensure it stops fermenting so that it does not release any more CO2 and create a “bottle bomb.”

Bottling works just the same as racking, only instead of having a second jug, there are bottles to fill up. When I bottle, I put the sterilized bottles on a chair with a large towel that I don’t care if it gets stained or not. The sterilized bottles are lined up to make it easier to process. I rack by either putting a clamp on the siphon tubing so that I can stop the flow and move my tubing to the next bottle, or I use a bottling wand. I got mine from my local supply store, and it is a tube with a ball in the bottom that has a little rod sticking out. Gravity and the force of the flow will push the ball down, blocking the flow, but when it is placed in the bottom of a bottle, the rod pushes the ball up, allowing liquid though.

When bottling, keep the hose or wand at the bottom to prevent splashing and too much contact with air. Fill the bottle as full as possible and then remove the hose or wand. The level will drop since the hose or wand was taking up space. Ideally, the bottle should only have half an inch to one inch of space between the top of the fluid to the cap or cork to minimize the amount of air in the bottle, or headspace.

I find bottling easier to do with two people. One person bottles while the other person takes away the full bottles and replaces them with new bottles. The second person may even have enough time to cork or cap the bottles, depending on the equipment. If there is only one person available for bottling, I highly recommend sterilizing a plate so that the tubing that goes in the bottle can be set down without contamination or the need to sterilize it again.

I should note that this is the method used for making a dry still drink, like wine. I’ll talk about how to make the drink sweet or carbonated in a later blog.