Bottling Question

I was over at a friends and we were finishing bottling up and we had about 2 beers worth of bottling left to do and ran out of bottles. So as an experiment we used a 1 wine bottle for the last 2 and re-corked (just pushed the cork all the way back down) it just to see what would happen. What can we expect? Could this actually work? Or was this the most rookie mistake of all time?

msudawgs267 said:

I was over at a friends and we were finishing bottling up and we had about 2 beers worth of bottling left to do and ran out of bottles. So as an experiment we used a 1 wine bottle for the last 2 and re-corked (just pushed the cork all the way back down) it just to see what would happen. What can we expect? Could this actually work? Or was this the most rookie mistake of all time?

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Should work just fine as long as there wasn't too much headspace. Many European brews are bottled that way in 750ml bottles.

how much priming sugar did you use for how large of a batch?

The only thing i could think that may be an issue is if the cork is not securely fit, the carbonation could *potentially* blow the cork right out.

One of three things may happen.

1. The beer carbonates fine and you drink it two weeks later and wonder: why was I so worried?

2. The cork is blown from the bottle. No harm done.

3. The bottle explodes.


As far as I know there is a difference between wine bottles and champagne bottles. Wine isn't carbonated and therefore doesn't need a bottle that can withstand the same pressures that a beer or champagne bottle must withstand. If your cork doesn't blow, there is a chance that your bottle will. If I were you, I would tape the cork on with duct tape, put the bottle in several plastic bags, and see what happens. Let it be an experiment. You may get some good beer out of it.

We didn't add priming sugar to each individual bottle we boiled down the standard 5oz. for a 5 gallon batch and mixed it in while transferring the non-carbonated beer to the bottling 5 gallon drum. I was worried about the same thing but we jammed it down in there pretty far, so I guess we will wait and see.

Oh, we're talking BOOM. The cork will probably pop out before the the bottle explodes, though.

If you pushed a cork in with your bare hands, it's not the least bit airtight so it'll pop off as soon as any carbonation builds so I think the probability of the bottle exploding is less than 30%.

A couple of reasons- one, wine bottles aren't designed to hold pressure, so the glass will give pretty easily. Two, corks aren't designed to hold pressure at all, so they'll blow off pretty easily. Number two will happen before number one, so you shouldn't have glass shards all over the place.

If you want to cork in wine bottles, you could use champagne bottles and champagne corks with wire cages. Otherwise, BOOM!