Bottlling Beer in used Wine Bottles?

I was wondering if you could reuse wine bottles to bottle beer or if anyone has done this before?

This has been discussed many times. Wine bottles are not designed to take pressure and champaign bottles don't use standard caps.

+1 Don't do it! They'll blow up.

As mentioned wine bottles cannot take carbonation so don't use them for beer.
However champagne and sparkling wine bottles make for nice beer bottles.

Champagne bottles from Europe take a larger cap than beer bottles so you will need different caps and a different bell on your capper. Also bench cappers work better so you don't have to worry about the thicker necks.

Sparkling wine bottles from US winerys use standard bottle caps and are easy to use. The only problem is the thicker necks and collars which may not work with wing cappers.

Craig

Thanks I might just try swing tops or bigger beer bottles such as 22oz instead.

CBBaron said:

Sparkling wine bottles from US winerys use standard bottle caps and are easy to use. The only problem is the thicker necks and collars which may not work with wing cappers.

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That has been my experience as well. I like the American Champagne bottles; nice and heavy.

I have cases of older 22.5 OZ sparkling wine bottles that I have used for beer. They work great and you fill less of them too. I do not give them away and use them for making room for more kegs in the serving fridge. I bottle some specialty beers like black beer in them as this is a seasonal beer. I keg the majority of the brews.

CBBaron said:

Sparkling wine bottles from US winerys use standard bottle caps and are easy to use. The only problem is the thicker necks and collars which may not work with wing cappers.
Craig

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Hmm, Is that true?
I tried some and found some with the larger diameter (i.e., the regular cap would not even sit right on the neck). Cook's was the brand IIRC.

I was dissapointed as I can ask a friend to save a bunch!

I've crown capped US produced sparkling wine bottles for years for my meads and I've never had one that didn't work. I know for a fact that Andre, Korbel, and Gruet sparkling wine bottles work well with the cheap wing cappers.

Martinelli's bottles work well with standard beer caps too.

Has anyone actually tried to bottle beer in a wine bottle? My guess is no, everybody is just handing down the same line - it won't work so don't try it......please prove me wrong or I will have to try it.

bmelanco said:

Has anyone actually tried to bottle beer in a wine bottle? My guess is no, everybody is just handing down the same line - it won't work so don't try it......please prove me wrong or I will have to try it.

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Go ahead and try it. All of us telling you not to won't stop you. But, if you have kids, please put them in a big rubbermaid container with a cover. I can tell you that the cork will probably pop out way before the bottle explodes, though. Corks are designed to pop out under pressure.

At the local liquor store in my town there is a brand of sparkling wine that has a swing top cap to re-cap it. If it wasn't $40/bottle I might get some and use them for beer. Just letting you know that such a thing exists, if you can find them.

YooperBrew said:

But, if you have kids, please put them in a big rubbermaid container with a cover.

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And remember to leave the lid open a crack so they can breathe.

YooperBrew said:

Go ahead and try it. All of us telling you not to won't stop you. But, if you have kids, please put them in a big rubbermaid container with a cover. I can tell you that the cork will probably pop out way before the bottle explodes, though. Corks are designed to pop out under pressure.

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I tried it, and it happened just what you said, the cork popped out after some time.

Using a bench capper (I've never owned or wanted a two-lever capper), Martinelli's sparkling cider bottles work fine, standard crown cap - and if you drink the stuff, you can save the plastic pop top if you only want to drink half a bottle at once.

All "Made in USA" "Champagne" bottles I have tried also work. If you want to get silly, you can get the corks and cages for them, but crown caps work fine and are cheaper/simpler. "Great Western" is the brand on the cases (with empties) I have from somone's wedding - I don't recall what the other USA "champagne" bottles were when got them, and label removal and general cleaning is the first step of making use of them, once you've checked that a standard cap does fit what you have. I try to keep the different sets together, since they are of slightly different heights, so the capper needs to be adjusted between types.

Both of the above are MUCH better-built bottles than a standard beer bottle. If you find a "function" you can usually get champagne empties complete with usable cases. Of the two types, the Champagne are built better than the cider, I think, but neither has ever given me a problem.

Actual Champagne from France bottles don't work, as they are a different size. Likewise Belgian Lambics.

ursus said:

I tried it, and it happened just what you said, the cork popped out after some time.

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You lucky! A friend of my dad's brought a bottle of something home from a party and wanted to get into it that night. But, alas! he didn't have a corkscrew. So he figured he'd slowly heat the bottle up in a pan full of water and the pressure would expel the cork. He tested the theory with an old wine bottle full of water and it worked just like he thought it would, so he popped the bottle in there and started heating it up ... just about the time he was wondering why the cork wasn't moving, the bottle exploded in the pan! Luckily Jerry wears glasses, so although shards of glass lodged in various parts of his face, his eyes were unscathed.

Panic-stricken lest his landlord (who lived on the floor below) might hear the blast and come racing upstairs to find he'd rented to a total moron who'd made a huge mess doing something that seemed in retrospect amazingly stupid, Jerry raced to his armchair, sat down in it, crossed one ankle over the other knee in that pose that guys strike when they want to look like they're relaxing, picked up a book and waited for his landlord to knock on the door. As he waited, he rehearsed his line: "Explosion? No, I didn't hear any explosion. Did you?"

Minutes dragged by and Jerry realized his landlord was not going to come. His eyes focused through the burgundy-colored stains on his glasses on the words of his book and he realized he was holding it upside-down. He also realized there were shards of glass and big purple stains all over his shirt sleeves. Trotting into the bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror. He was covered with red wine and bits of glass and his glasses were a bit sideways. And he realized how it would have looked if his landlord came, him sitting there in the white-and-purple shirt, glasses askew, hair messed up, covered with broken glass and "reading" an upside-down book: "Explosion? No, I didn't hear any explosion."

To Jerry's credit, it apparently didn't occur to him to simply push the cork down into the wine. I've done that before. It works a lot better than blowing up the kitchen.