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**biochemedic** · 07-19-2012, 04:11 PM

This is how I pack a 12 oz longneck. It may be overkill, but I'm fully confident that barring *major* trauma to the box, this will prevent any breakage, and probably would prevent leakage even if a bottle broke or bottle bomb occurred:

Materials: 1 bottle of beer (duh), 2 sheets bubble wrap, 2 one gallon ziplocs, scotch tape.

Step 1 - I use two sheets (12 inch square) of small bubble wrap. As mentioned previously this can be purchased at Wally World in a large roll very cheaply. I do roll them from one corner (it facilitates folding the ends later).

Step 2 - Roll up second sheet. I generally have the 'bubble side' of the sheets facing each other, and the flat sides to the bottle and facing outward. This seems to help with slippage, and facilitates taping. I do put a small piece of tape at the corner end of each wrap.

Step 3 - Fold and flatten, then tape down the cap end...

Step 4 - ...and then the bottom end. You will see that wrapping the sheets from the corner allows a nice 'tail' to fold over and fully protect the ends.

Step 5 - Put the wrapped bottle in a gallon size ziploc.

Step 6 - Roll the bottle up in the first bag; as you seal up the ziploc, squeeze out *most but not all* of the air. This allows a little additional cushion.

Step 7 - Repeat with the second bag. Here's the finished bottle, ready to pack in a box...

Draygon · 07-19-2012, 04:29 PM

Thx for that, ill pick up all that stuff, last bit i need to know is the size of the box to hold 3 fully wrapped bottles and the cheapest place to get them.

**Clanchief** · 07-19-2012, 04:35 PM

I'm not sure what size boxes people are planning to use, but for 3 beers, I was thinking of something around a 12 x 12 x 12 box. I'll probably use similar wrapping to what Biochemedic posted, but I have a whole crap ton of packing peanuts left over from a shipment sent to me from Austin Homebrew. I figure I might as well give them a little extra buffer. 12x12x12 should fit three bottles with packing material fairly well, based on my college memories of working in a Mail Boxes Etc.

**biochemedic** · 07-19-2012, 05:24 PM

I still plan on measuring a few of the boxes that were used last year, and I'll post that info up when I can get that done (got too tired last night after mucking around trying to re-size and upload the pictures of the packing procedure). You can use a variety of box sizes, but from my recall, 12x12x12 is pretty close to a good size. I remember thinking that the "optimum" size (ie, able to comfortably fit the three wrapped bottles, without having excessive space to fill with additional material) was a little smaller than that. When I pack I also do put in shredded paper (from shredding old bills/receipts/junk mail), which works just as well as peanuts or crumpled paper/newspaper. There's definitely a variety of ways to do things.

**Clanchief** · 07-19-2012, 06:33 PM

Yeah, shredded paper works very well. I'm using packing peanuts myself because I happen to have a metric ton of them sitting around. At least, that's what SWMBO says.

It's a good way for me to us them up.

**biochemedic** · 07-19-2012, 07:02 PM

Ok, here goes...as I recalled, 12x12x12 is bigger than actually needed, the box size needed is deceptively small. Certainly, if you could get 12x12x12 cheaply, you'll just need some additional packing material to fill in the extra space.

10.5 inches seems to be about a minimum for the long axis of the bottle, so one box dimension needs to be at least that length.

I've formatted the listed sizes below as follows:
'Length of box oriented to the long axis of the bottle' x width x height'

Box 1 -- 12 x 7.5 x 5.5

Box 2 -- 12 x 9.5 x 4.5

Box 3 -- 11.5 x 8.75 x 6. As you can see this one is a Priority Mail Flat Rate box...

Box 4 -- 10.5 x 7.25 x 5.5. This box has a real nice tight fit and will need a minimum of extra packing material.

Box 5 -- 10.5 x 12 x 4.5

**biochemedic** · 07-23-2012, 12:28 AM

The Caramel Quad is bottled! (Now comes the long wait for December...)

jtakacs · 07-23-2012, 11:54 PM

sweet... i'm brewing the abbey weizen in a month - only 1.062 OG so it shouldn't need much... thinking 30 days bottle conditioning, 30ish days fermenting... i might do a test batch with homegrown hops first in a few weeks - i have some that'll be ready.

looking forward to it bio... sounds yummy!

**Clanchief** · 07-24-2012, 04:12 PM

I'm brewing the Crabapple Lambicky Ale tonight. I'll post up here with how things go!

dgez · 08-01-2012, 11:15 PM

I racked the juniper rye bock to 2ndary today. It tastes great! It has a very woody flavor to it, like a freshly cut pine tree..or like a freshly cut 2X4. Its not as in your face as I thought it would be considering 8oz of crushed juniper berries were used. The gravity reading is 1.017...I was hoping to get it down to 14 or 15. I'm still going to let it sit at fermentation temp for another month because I'm going to be brewing another lager in the coming days. So once that lager is done I'll kick the temps down for a 10 week slumber at 37. I'll probably take a final gravity reading a month from now.