Swing top bottles

MrL73 said:

Slight tangent to the original post... has anyone found a plastic crate that will hold the swing top bottles well and still allow for stacking? Most of the ones on ebay are for milk bottles or beer bottles that are shorter than the 500ml swing tops. I think. Unless I'm mistaken...?

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This is just what I bought on ebay, milk crates fill of grolsch bottles. The crate sits on the bottle tops rather than the crate below. To make them more stable I put pieces of mdf or ply between each pair of crates, so the bottles support the crates above. Doesn't seem to cause any problems... Maybe the weight keeps the bottles tightly sealed! I have them stacked 4 crates high this way with no problems...

BTW, when I met the seller he said, "Oh, I may have forgotten to mention, all the bottles are still full of my last brew..... From 3 years ago...."
Nice fella.

stephen1546 said:

I seem to have trouble keeping the bottle still whilst capping.

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I used a towel under the bottles for grip. A rubber mat would be even better

dan125 said:

I don't use them anymore as they are too tall for the shelf in my keezer.

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That is one draw back that I have found too. My 500ml flip tops are too tall to fit in to my usual bottle boxes or crates. I think I'm going to buy a couple of the taller wine crates to keep them in (rather than the milk crate that I use at the moment).

Edit: I've just read @simon41 's excellent idea of using MDF to help stack standard milk crates. I think I'll give that a go.

stephen1546 said:

Yeah, expensive for a bottle with nothing in it. I have looked around for other swing top beers, however only found Grolsch

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I've been looking for swing tops too, and found a few alternatives to Grolsh:

Aldi do a German beer in 500ml swing tops from about October-December every year, look out for them in the special buys section. They are £2 each and the beer is pretty good.

If you buy in bulk you can get 24 bottles of Flesburger Pils from the Belgian Beer Company for just over £50 (free postage), they are 330ml brown swing tops

https://www.thebelgianbeercompany.c...IOlXQtxtAGzMztkEqlyWozD0Y8byGM0BoC44wQAvD_BwE

Also Belgium in a box do a mixed crate of 20 Floreffe trappist beers, 4 different varieties, all in brown 330ml flip tops, and you get the crate as well. I think it works out at about £55 with postage.

https://belgiuminabox.com/shop/mixe...ma-melior-triple-20-x-33-cl.html#.XFtaMC2caRs

Both a bit more pricey than Grolsh, but if you fancied something different...

MagnusTS said:

I've been looking for swing tops too, and found a few alternatives to Grolsh:

Aldi do a German beer in 500ml swing tops from about October-December every year, look out for them in the special buys section. They are £2 each and the beer is pretty good.

If you buy in bulk you can get 24 bottles of Flesburger Pils from the Belgian Beer Company for just over £50 (free postage), they are 330ml brown swing tops

https://www.thebelgianbeercompany.c...IOlXQtxtAGzMztkEqlyWozD0Y8byGM0BoC44wQAvD_BwE

Also Belgium in a box do a mixed crate of 20 Floreffe trappist beers, 4 different varieties, all in brown 330ml flip tops, and you get the crate as well. I think it works out at about £55 with postage.

https://belgiuminabox.com/shop/mixe...ma-melior-triple-20-x-33-cl.html#.XFtaMC2caRs

Both a bit more pricey than Grolsh, but if you fancied something different...

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Anyone who gets over to France should be able to pick up Fischer for around 1.20 a 500ml bottle. Obviously only handy if you're going to France and like 6% cooking lager.

I think the effect of green v brown is very minimal baring in mind that most of us keep bottles in dark areas any way. I used to always use a couple of clear bottles and didn't notice any effect in them

MagnusTS said:

I've been looking for swing tops too, and found a few alternatives to Grolsh:

Aldi do a German beer in 500ml swing tops from about October-December every year, look out for them in the special buys section. They are £2 each and the beer is pretty good.

If you buy in bulk you can get 24 bottles of Flesburger Pils from the Belgian Beer Company for just over £50 (free postage), they are 330ml brown swing tops

https://www.thebelgianbeercompany.c...IOlXQtxtAGzMztkEqlyWozD0Y8byGM0BoC44wQAvD_BwE

Also Belgium in a box do a mixed crate of 20 Floreffe trappist beers, 4 different varieties, all in brown 330ml flip tops, and you get the crate as well. I think it works out at about £55 with postage.

https://belgiuminabox.com/shop/mixe...ma-melior-triple-20-x-33-cl.html#.XFtaMC2caRs

Both a bit more pricey than Grolsh, but if you fancied something different...

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Might give them a go!

Swing tops are slightly quicker if you cap at the end of filling all the bottles but if you have your caps already in steriliser and cap each bottle while the next is filling it takes no longer

We will be driving through France this summer, I intend to make sure there's room in the back for a crate or two from a hypermarket somewhere.
Also, not cheap but look at "German Markets". It does seem that they are more common on the continent than here.

Leon103 said:

You must have a super capper to do It in 2 seconds. It takes that long to put a cap in my bench capper.

I put my bottle a in a bottle crate. With swing tops I am closing the gap whilst filling the next bottle.

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So with a 40 pint batch, in pint bottles, you save 1 minute 20 seconds! Or 2 minutes in my case as I take 3 seconds a cap since I haven't yet honed my performance to Olympic standards. Each to his own- I have a couple of crates of Fischer bottles as I had to drink the stuff until I got my brewery up and running after the move. They're ok, but they hold too much for a pint glass. I prefer to use different colour caps to identify the beer. Saves labelling. In spite of what Graham Wheeler says in his last edition of his book on home-brewing, PETs are great for bottling in bulk. I use Perier as that's the water my wife drinks. The don't leak, you can use them over and over again, they don't lose pressure, it's a great way of recycling. You can purge air from them by filling and gently squeezing the air out before doing up the cap. You can tell when your beer's ready because they become more rigid from the pressure, if you over-carbonate, you can let the gas out and re-tighten the lid, if you use a yeast which eventually devours everything- like the Belgian wheat been yeast- you can (again) let the pressure out, etc, etc. The only downside is they don't look pretty as a nice new bottle with a label on it.

An Ankoù said:

PETs are great for bottling in bulk. I use Perier as that's the water my wife drinks. The don't leak, you can use them over and over again, they don't lose pressure, it's a great way of recycling. You can purge air from them by filling and gently squeezing the air out before doing up the cap. You can tell when your beer's ready because they become more rigid from the pressure, if you over-carbonate, you can let the gas out and re-tighten the lid, if you use a yeast which eventually devours everything- like the Belgian wheat been yeast- you can (again) let the pressure out, etc, etc. The only downside is they don't look pretty as a nice new bottle with a label on it.

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+1 on all of that

Victor Churchill said:

We will be driving through France this summer, I intend to make sure there's room in the back for a crate or two from a hypermarket somewhere.
Also, not cheap but look at "German Markets". It does seem that they are more common on the continent than here.

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You can buy them for £1.25 each or 20 for £21.95 from thehomebrewcompany.co.uk. If had some lovely stuff from the supermarkets- at a price, and some horrendous stuff too.

An Ankoù said:

PETs are great for bottling in bulk.

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It may be a good idea to treat PET bottles with a measure of caution. The attached document is over 15 years old and the links no longer work, but the caveat still exists, unless someone who works in the plastics industry can reassure us that things have changed.
Regardless, don't put PET bottles containing water in the car where they are in direct sunlight.

hanks Rodj

Rodj said:

It may be a good idea to treat PET bottles with a measure of caution. The attached document is over 15 years old and the links no longer work, but the caveat still exists, unless someone who works in the plastics industry can reassure us that things have changed.
Regardless, don't put PET bottles containing water in the car where they are in direct sunlight.

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Thanks Rodj,
I had heard about that and thought it had been debunked in much the same way as the scare about boiling in aluminium vessels leading to alzheimer's has been. Still, one can't be too careful and I wonder if anyone has any, more recent, knowledge on the subject. Over here, (cheap) cider and (Spanish) wine are both available in PETs. I've often wondered about polymer migration and leaching of fillers from so called "food grade" containers, too. In the meantime, I'll try to keep as many Perrier bottles as I can away from the Sixth Continent.

Rodj said:

It may be a good idea to treat PET bottles with a measure of caution. The attached document is over 15 years old and the links no longer work, but the caveat still exists, unless someone who works in the plastics industry can reassure us that things have changed.
Regardless, don't put PET bottles containing water in the car where they are in direct sunlight.

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I'm sure that a lot of that is true.
However, to put that into perspective, you are drinking alcohol in a significant concentration (compared to possibly a few ppb of leached chemical), and, to some, alcohol is also a carcinogen. So if you are worried about that sort of thing, you should probably give up drinking first, rather give up re-using PET bottles

terrym said:

I'm sure that a lot of that is true.
However, to put that into perspective, you are drinking alcohol in a significant concentration (compared to possibly a few ppb of leached chemical), and, to some, alcohol is also a carcinogen. So if you are worried about that sort of thing, you should probably give up drinking first, rather give up re-using PET bottles

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I think I've seen you make this argument a couple of times before and it always makes me chuckle.

terrym said:

So if you are worried about that sort of thing, you should probably give up drinking first, rather give up re-using PET bottles

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Alternatively, increase the drinking so that you're too inebriated to notice the PET poisoning.

I was using plastic bottles when this subject came up in the forum years ago no one had proof PET bottles can/cannot leach chemicals so I emailed the food standards agency and was given several documents to read, to cut a long story short I could not find a definitive answer so I decided to bin my pop bottles and move to glass.

I believe bottles made specificall for home brew have a barrier to stop this which indicates there may be a problem so my advice would be use bottles designed for the job if you are concerned.

I agree with Chippy that they have a barrier but it does break down with use l also believe that they are ok for short use such as beer mail etc

Ps I meant bottles made for the homebrewer only don't know about other mass produced bottle such as pop bottles etc