Bottler Broke Mid Bottling

Kinda funny story,

I bottled last night and my bottler broke about 4 gallons into bottling. So I had to scramble to find something to put the rest of my beer in. I had about a gallon left, So I sanitised and cleaned a plastic Soda bottle, 2 litters. Is my beer going to be ok? Also, it took me about 2 hours to bottle then, is that too long to for my beer to be exposed to air? I"m kinda worried, but I will relax, and have a homebrew. Any comments or help would be great.

happened to me on my very first brew...and on the very first bottle. I tested the capper to make sure I knew how to use it, and then when I filled up my first bottle and went to cap it the thing snapped. It was one of those Red Barron wing cappers....is that what you had? I ended up calling up a coworker and borrowing his bench capper. He saved my entire batch!

Your batch should be fine after sitting for a couple hours. Mine was sitting for at least an hour before I was able to get back to it and it turned out okay.

It was in fact a Red Butterfly style capper. So the 2 litter bottle of beer will also be ok?

Morkin said:

It was in fact a Red Butterfly style capper. So the 2 litter bottle of beer will also be ok?

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I'm just a newb at this too, so maybe someone else can confirm...but I would assume so as long as you cleaned and sanitized everything. I've heard of people using them before. You'll just have to pop it open on a day you are ready to drink 2L of beer

I tried everything to fix my capper when mine broke. There is such an amazing amount of force that goes into putting those caps on though that there was no way I'd be able to do it by hand or jerryrigging something together. When I bottle again in a few weeks I'm running out and grabbing one of those bench cappers instead.

You should be okay. It is a little harder for the nasties to get a foothold post fermentation when the sugars are mostly gone and there is some alcohol in the mix. If you are concerned, I would let them carbonate as normal and then refrigerate. That will slow down anything that might be producing off flavors.

As for the PET bottle, cleaned and sanitized, there is nothing wrong with it at all. They sell attachments that let you force carbonate in them. And beer is carbonated to a lower level than soda, anyway.

agree w/ ghack. I read somewhere else on this forum today that same thing, beer only gets up to like 1/2 the pressure they put soda in, so you've got nothign to worry about, and I also saw a thing on mythbusters where they pressure tested the 3 gal ones up to something ridiculous like 75psi w/o bursting

It's always a good idea to have a backup for all crucial brewing equipment and ingredients, including:

• Bottle caps
• Bottle capper
• Dry yeast
• Siphon hose
• Fermenter
• Auto Siphon or racking cane
• Bottling wand
• Grain bag
• Priming sugar
• Adjuncts to adjust beer gravity, taste or mouthfeel at various stages of the process if something went wrong

I misread the thread title for a moment and thought it read "Bottle Broke". That brought back some memories...

When I was maybe 10 my dad tried to make beer a couple of times. It never turned out any good (in retrospect I'm not surprised based on what I can remember of how he brewed it!) but I loved helping him bottle. We didn't have a capper machine, just a little bit of curved metal that fit over the cap. You sat the cap on the bottle, the curved metal on the cap, then hit it with a hammer. If you did this just right, it would bend the sides of the cap over to create a seal. Hit too soft, and you mangle the cap and have to try again. Hit too hard, and, yeah, you guessed it...

At age 10, I thought it was tremendous fun to have beer all over the kitchen floor, shards of glass everywhere, and maybe a half dozen bottles that actually made it out the end of the process (in many cases just to explode later due to inconsistent carbonation).

It was a strange mixture of relief and disappointment when I got into brewing myself many years later, and discovered just how much easier capping can be!

ghack said:

As for the PET bottle, cleaned and sanitized, there is nothing wrong with it at all.

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Agreed. I wouldn't use PET for multi-year cellering, but works fine for normal purposes.

Morkin said:

Kinda funny story,

I bottled last night and my bottler broke about 4 gallons into bottling. So I had to scramble to find something to put the rest of my beer in. I had about a gallon left, So I sanitised and cleaned a plastic Soda bottle, 2 litters. Is my beer going to be ok? Also, it took me about 2 hours to bottle then, is that too long to for my beer to be exposed to air? I"m kinda worried, but I will relax, and have a homebrew. Any comments or help would be great.

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Sounds like some good MacGuyver work!

Nope, your beer is ruined. Send it to me for proper disposal. I recycle beer.

Any tips for NOT breaking my capper mid-bottling tomorrow?

magnj said:

Any tips for NOT breaking my capper mid-bottling tomorrow?

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just don't press down too hard. I think that might have been my mistake...I don't know. It doesn't take too much force on your side to push the cap on.

The action is more like a rotation with the hands rather than a downward force.
Pretend you're breaking spaghetti, not trying to push the bottle through the counter.

And do it on a towel, or cookie pan, to catch the broken bottle, cause every now and again...