belgian beer bottles

I would like to bottle a saison using belgian beer bottles and corks. I don't have the money to spend on an italian floor corker. Has anyone come up with a way to do this on the cheap?

I also thought about using plastic champagne stoppers, and tapping them in with a rubber mallet. Has anyone tried this with belgian beer bottles? Does it work? Are they big enough that the beer won't go flat? and then add a wire cage.

Also, do the belgian beer bottles take regular beer caps?

thanks
centralpabrewer

Plastic champagne corks won't work. Champagne bottles and Belgian's have a slightly different neck inner diameter. Call your local home brew supply and ask if they will rent you one for a day or two. That's what I did before I bought mine. My LHBS charged me $15 for three days.

-Todd

It's been a few months since this was posted. What did you end up doing? I was thinking of doing the same thing, but I was going to buy champagne bottles and use the plastic corks. If they work for champagne they should work for beer, right? And they should fit into champagne bottles. What did you end up doing?

I ended up buying champange bottles, plastic stoppers and wire hoods. My LHBS sells the belgian beer bottles, but does not have an italian floor corker to rent.

I wasn't really keen on using green bottles, but oh well. I wanted to carbonate the saison pretty high and thought the champange bottles would be better than regular beer bottles. They look pretty good. I just used a rubber mallet to tap the plastic stoppers in.

Thanks for the reply. That's exactly what I plan on doing with the saison I have fermenting right now. I want to carbonate to 3-3.5 volumes of co2. I also want it in the champagne bottles for presentation purposes.

thanks!

I carbed at 2.9 volumes. I just bottled last week, so I can't tell you how it is. I hope it comes out pretty fizzy.

I have done a few Belgian's. What I ended up doing was getting proper bottles and corks from northern NORTHERN BREWER: Bottling and using a Colonna capper/corker. It works great. I just followed this guy's walk through and they came out perfect. SLO Brewer » Corking Belgians

I've used the plastic champagne corks but only on certain bottles. I don't believe they work on the regular belgian style 750mL's.

Well for what it's worth, I used the plastic corks in champagne bottles and I'll never do it again. They are a ***** and a half to get out. Yesterday I had to take a vice grips to them to get enough leverage to remove them. Next time it will be worth the money to get the corker and corks.