Bottles
Jimmy | March 13, 2008
When we first started making our own spirits, it was done partly from a desire to save money on alcohol but also for the fun of finding out how it worked, experimenting with different methods, etc. Something that didn’t cross my mind until a little too late was the fact that as we were no longer buying alcohol all the time, we wouldn’t have a source of usable glass bottles. As I’m sure many of you will be aware, the urge to give a bottle to visiting friends is all too great, and before you know it you can’t find one when you need it yourself.
How do other people cope with this? I’ve considered using wine bottles and a corker, sticking with plastic ‘PET’ bottles, buying old bottles from flea markets, charity shops, etc - I’m just curious to see how others have handled this issue. Leave a comment, it’d be great to hear your views!
Ok, for bottles, you can either try asking your local
Fatbloke | June 1, 2008Ok, for bottles, you can either try asking your local pub for any bottles that don’t get returned, or you can get them for about 50p a piece from the local home brew shop.
Proper wine bottles will require some sort of corking device.
Or if you buy beer bottles from the “HBS” or scrounge them from the local pub then you’ll still need a crown capping device (mine was less than a tenner) and some crown caps (bags of 50, can’t remember how much - not dear).
I’m guessing, but I wouldn’t suggest plastic pop bottles are such a good idea. Why? because they’re not really suitable for high % ABV liquid. Yes, they’re used for various ciders and beers, but those are all less than 10 % ABV, I’d guess that high % stuff may have a similar effect to putting petrol in a plastic (P.E.T. and/or Poly Carbonate) bottle i.e. it might not dissolve it like petrol would but I’d guess other probable degrading of the plastic i.e. perishing or becoming brittle.
Sticking your finger through the side of the plastic and spilling the contents is a waste of perfectly good booze.
Oh and you can sometimes see stuff on ebay and maybe even your local freecycle list.