Home 6-pack bottler

Hey all,
I work with an Intern/University student that is designing a bottler for his Sr. design project. Do me a favor and check out the video and concept and provide him a little feed back. I think he is right on track with his ideas.






Thanks

AC

That would be great. I have but one question, how do all 6 bottles stay in perfect formation when moving from one station to the next?

Are the filling tubes and bell cappers replaceable if one were to fall off or something?

I would not pay $400 to fill & cap my bottles. Capping 6 at a time would be great, but $400 is a hefty price tag for me. Maybe not for others. I would consider something much less, such as $200 or less. I realize that is likely too low.

Looks like a good start. Without knowing how the filling station really works, I can make a suggestion on the bottle track. He needs to have a way of accurately placing all 6 bottles for the filling and capping stations. I would suggest some kind of 6-pack holder that you place the bottles in first and then the holder sits accurately in the track. This holder should also have a carry handle so it can help store bottles as well. You could just use the normal cardboard ones but they wouldn't be as accurate and would degrade from getting wet. There can be spring loaded stops at each station to so you push the bottles up to the stop, fill, pull the stop handle, push bottles, release the stop and it goes back to its neutral position.

I like the idea, but I think $400 would be steep for most homebrewers. I think $200 max would be an OK price point, but there could also be different models. Tell him good luck with the project.

looks like Hello and I had the same ideas.

My concern is that in filling 6 bottles at once, you are assuming that they will all fill at the same rate, therfore getting to full at the same time. I use a double bottling wand setup, and I can say that the flow does vary from time to time. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/double-barrel-bottling-now-twice-fast-257264/ I always start one bottle ahead of the other, so I can concentrate on the correct bottle, and not have to guess which will get full first.
Most automatic bottlers I have seen in brewery tours and videos use a cascading setup. they may be filling several bottles at the same time, but they are all in a different stage of fullness. I do not know what they use to determine the stopping point of filling (time, sensor, overflow)

gingerdawg said:

My concern is that in filling 6 bottles at once, you are assuming that they will all fill at the same rate, therfore getting to full at the same time. I use a double bottling wand setup, and I can say that the flow does vary from time to time. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/double-barrel-bottling-now-twice-fast-257264/ I always start one bottle ahead of the other, so I can concentrate on the correct bottle, and not have to guess which will get full first.
Most automatic bottlers I have seen in brewery tours and videos use a cascading setup. they may be filling several bottles at the same time, but they are all in a different stage of fullness. I do not know what they use to determine the stopping point of filling (time, sensor, overflow)

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I think they mention in the video there would be sensors for the volume. I imagine its either measuring the flow out of the wand, or the level in the bottle which could be an issue if you have some foaming?

$400 isnt THAT crazy, considering the closest thing to it is a few thousand dollars. But I think $2-300 is the most someone like me could consider paying. I would imagine if you just set up a track with a cart that fit 6 bottles snugly that locked into place and slid them all to the next station.


One issue though to consider is that most people have varying heights of bottles. On my capper, there are around 20 level adjustments so i can bottle anything from a 7oz barley wine, to a champagne bottle.

Having worked with a Meheen bottler, I can tell you getting 6 bottles to index correctly is going to be a big issue. Also, I would be very interested in the force required to cap 6 bottles at once. I'm not sure a hand lever would work.

Honestly, I would set my sights on a two head machine and see how that goes.

Most of the home brewers who are willing to drop that kind of money on gadgets have already switched to kegs and rarely bottle stuff.

I think something like this is actually more marketable to small brewpubs that occasionally bottle special release beers. Even then that's a pretty small market.

I have a colona capper/corker and doubt I'll ever have any desire for anything more. I bought a pack of 144 caps a couple years ago and still have plenty left.

The few beers that I bottle primarily get corked and caged.

I would rate this ZERO INTEREST. For $400 it's way outside the ROI IMO.

Frankly, it looks finicky. Getting all bottles to fill correctly will be a major challenge.

If I were to design a homemade filling/capping station I'd probably do it single-bottle style:

Place bottle in the designated location. Swing down the filling arm. Press button to fill. When beer is to proper level it automatically stops the fill and purges with CO2. Then you would lift the arm up, swing it over a bit and lower the capping arm down to cap the beer.

They would need to be height adjustable as many of the homebrewers who bottle know, bottles come in a variety of different sizes.

For 400 bucks you are going to have a hard time finding people who want to continue bottling, they are just going to buy a kegging set up.

Also, the time savings for a 5 gallon batch of beer would likely be eaten up by the extra set up time involved.

A few things that haven't been mentioned yet are:
Most homebrewers have a mishmash of different height and width bottles, so capping and indexing would be difficult.
Variance in bottle height of exactly similar bottles will probably be big enough to prevent a good capping success rate, or possibly to crush the tallest bottle and shatter it.

$400 is laughably expensive for the homebrewer, but minuscule for the nano brewery. I could see a system like this being used for the "first few pallets after we moved out of my kitchen" phase of brewery development.

A better focus may be on a single bottle automated filler. If I had a machine filling while I was capping I would be happy.