Alternative corking techniques

smashed4 · 08-13-2009, 06:27 PM

Anybody ever tried alternative corking techniques? I mean different strategy than the belgian bottle, mushroom cork + wire hood?

I had some old #9 wine corks and different kinds of belgian bottles and tried to cork them with my hand corker. To my surprise it was a tight fit..

I am thinking of corking one or two belgian bottles with the #9 corks + waxing it or using a shrink wrapper and see if it holds pressure as an experiment. My inspiration for this is the old English bottled ales (~1900 bottles) I've seen pictures off that were corked and waxed.

I think that if it holds pressure, it would be pretty cool, original and cheap!

**Boar Beer** · 08-13-2009, 06:37 PM

We have used regular wine corks (not sure or the number) and champagne bottles. Just make sure that the bottles you are using are made for pressure

smashed4 · 08-13-2009, 06:50 PM

Great. Did you use a wire hood on the champagne bottle?

I would suspect that any technique used for champagne would also work for beer as champagne is such an highly carbonated drink..

beeraroundtown · 08-13-2009, 08:31 PM

Fantome uses the wine corks then puts a cap over the top of them, you could do that.

Orangevango · 08-13-2009, 09:01 PM

you could just get a little dutch boy to stick his finger in the hole.

smashed4 · 08-15-2009, 07:03 PM

OK so I decided to try it!

Since i don't want to waste any good beer, I thought of doing a little experiment.

I brewed 3L (~1gal) of green tea, added 40grams of regular table sugar, cooled it down and mixed in 5gr of dried champagne yeast. This amount of sugar should produce about 3.5 - 4 volumes of CO2, since I wanted to test the worst case scenario..

I bottled in 4 bottles:

2 belgian 750ml bottles, corked with #9 agglomerated wine corks. Cork is inserted all the way down like a wine bottle.
1 660ml (22oz) regular bottle capped with a crown cap.
1 340ml (12oz) regular bottle capped with a crown cap.

The 2 capped bottles will act as control. This way, if the corked bottles are leaking CO2, I will be able to tell by comparing to the control, capped bottles which I know should not be leaking.

For this experiment, I am not holding the corks in place with anything. I will store the bottles in a box to avoid any mess should the corks pop-out.

I made 2 test bottles and 2 control bottles. I plan on opening a corked and a capped bottle in 3 weeks, and another set in 3 months, to see if the corks are also good for longer term storage.

I'll update the thread with the results if anyone is interested..

smashed4 · 08-16-2009, 05:05 PM

Here's a pic of my little experiment

Looks like its carbing and nothing exploding yet..