Glass Bottles and Bottling Bucket With Soda

Hi all,

I have the homebrew soda extract from my LHBS and I'm interested in putting together a small batch of soda to test out the process. I have a couple of questions, though.

I don't have any plastic soda bottles around the house at the moment. My LHBS told me that using glass beer bottles won't be a problem, but I wanted to check here for the hive mind's reaction to that. Can I use glass beer bottles and standard capping methods to bottle soda? Am I being crazy here and should I just order some PET bottles? My LHBS doesn't carry any PET.

Can I use my bottling bucket and wand to bottle these sodas? My concern is that the soda will impart a flavor to the bucket, tubing and wand. This is a cola extract, not root beer, if that makes a difference.

Oh. And I looked around using The Google for a while for these answers and couldn't find anything that specifically answered these questions, which is why I'm asking here.

Thanks for your help!

I would buy seperate bottling equipment for your sodas. It will give off some flavors that are hard to get rid of.

Also, I wouldn't use glass. You'll probably notice when looking at your bottles that different brands of beer have different quality glass. Some will be thin glass and some aren't. If you get one of these thin glass bottles mixed in and bottle a soda in it, you could have a bottle bomb.

Soda is carbonated at a much higher level than beer, so you put a lot more pressure on that glass. I would buy some PET bottles just to be safe.

By the way, homemade soda tastes completely different than what you're probably used to. The fact that you need yeast to carbonate it gives it an odd taste. Unless you keg, that is.

Thanks, a bunch, Suthrn. I appreciate the info.

Could you re-use commercially bottled (capped) rootbeer bottles?

Cheers! ,

Joe

+1 to what SoCo said. Until you've actually tainted (hehe I said taint) equipment with the flavor of cola or root beer it is hard to belief how frickin persistent and pervasive that aroma is.

I mixed some syrup in a glass bottle the other night prior to kegging it. Just root beer extract and sugar with a cup of water and I had to soak the glass bottle in oxyclean for a couple hours to get rid of the smell. This was glass. Your bottling bucket and hosing would be tainted beyond repair.

On the issue with bottling it in glass the problem is that you want to monitor how carbed it is so you can refrigerate and stop the carbing at the right moment. There will still be a lot of sugar left for the yeast to eat if it ever wakes up and if that happens your glass will explode and it will be very dangerous. Those of us with grandparents who made bottled root beer can remember a bottle or two from most batches blowing up. For whatever reason I don't remember anyone ever getting injured from it though. But I do remember drinking some overly fermented root beer when I was just a tyke and getting a little silly with my cousins.

With pet you know how carbed it is.