MCJones87
Active Member
Hi All,
I had a look to see if this question had been asked previously but had no joy, so if it has then I apologise. I still consider myself pretty new to the home brewing world despite having been doing it for a good 9 months or so, and to date have had some decent successes with both bottling and pressure barrelling my brews. I wont go into the obvious time saving aspects of barrel v bottle when it comes to bottling day but I have wondered over the time saving opportunity of using new bottles v re-using old glass bottles. My experience has been that using new glass is guaranteed to save time as the cleaning and rinsing needed is just simply quicker - a decent long dip in a hot VWP solution in the bath, followed by a rinse in tap water for new glass v the need to scrub each bottle clean before sanitising when re-using old bottles. However, I did recently read an article around bottling that mentioned commercial micro breweries will almost exclusively use new glass bottles. The article then implied that while some breweries do use a liquid sanitiser, there are plenty that choose not to and will simply rinse new glass before decanting.
This seemed wrong to me so I thought I would throw it out into the community to see what others thought. I ma almost certain that there will be planet of folks out there saying not to bother buying glass bottles and to always re-use, providing there is a decent level of care taken to clean bottles as soon as they have been emptied. All well and good, unless you actually want to ensure that you have a batch that looks identical in the same bottle size and design... plus a friend of mine recently asked me to produce a batch of beers for him to use as wedding favours - another example of when using the same glass style is a necessity.
Thanks in advance for any input :grin:
MCJ
I had a look to see if this question had been asked previously but had no joy, so if it has then I apologise. I still consider myself pretty new to the home brewing world despite having been doing it for a good 9 months or so, and to date have had some decent successes with both bottling and pressure barrelling my brews. I wont go into the obvious time saving aspects of barrel v bottle when it comes to bottling day but I have wondered over the time saving opportunity of using new bottles v re-using old glass bottles. My experience has been that using new glass is guaranteed to save time as the cleaning and rinsing needed is just simply quicker - a decent long dip in a hot VWP solution in the bath, followed by a rinse in tap water for new glass v the need to scrub each bottle clean before sanitising when re-using old bottles. However, I did recently read an article around bottling that mentioned commercial micro breweries will almost exclusively use new glass bottles. The article then implied that while some breweries do use a liquid sanitiser, there are plenty that choose not to and will simply rinse new glass before decanting.
This seemed wrong to me so I thought I would throw it out into the community to see what others thought. I ma almost certain that there will be planet of folks out there saying not to bother buying glass bottles and to always re-use, providing there is a decent level of care taken to clean bottles as soon as they have been emptied. All well and good, unless you actually want to ensure that you have a batch that looks identical in the same bottle size and design... plus a friend of mine recently asked me to produce a batch of beers for him to use as wedding favours - another example of when using the same glass style is a necessity.
Thanks in advance for any input :grin:
MCJ