Champagne bottles

hi ya'll
Since there will be a crapload of new year eve parties, and people will be drinking champagne to toast..
I want to grab as many champane bottles for free for a upcoming brew...
I've called some bars and they'll hold the empties

Trying to grab around 50-75 750ml bottles...

First off, brewing a belgian strong ale(still making up recipe)
It will be a 15 gallon batch...
also want to bottle condition..maybe with champagne yeast too...

Alot of the bottles are green(almost all green)
My plan for the bottles is to spray paint the bottles black, then etch my brewery name on it...WutSon brewery..

see any problems using those bottles? goin to wire cage also...

The only problem I see is a very long bottling and corking day

I'll post the recipe and brew date later...

igotsand

Good idea. No issues, they're obviously designed to hold substantial pressure. Just make sure they're really clean.

I use champagne bottles for my sour/brett beers with plastic champagne corks and wire cages. It's not the nicest looking or always the easiest way to bottle but it's very effective. It seems like breweries are very uniform about champagne bottle sizes (especially those that cork and cap or just cap) but wineries that produce champagne seem to use different sizes, even here in the US. If you are using actual corks it may not be an issue but if you're using caps or plastic corks you may want to try capping or pushing in the plastic cork to make sure you can seal the bottle before you fill them. I don't know if you will have problems using the same corks on the larger mouths as the smaller mouths that take standard bottle caps but that may be something to look at with the bottles as well.

Why fight the bottle color? IMO paint is going to look "not so good" real fast unless you use some sort of glass specific paint.

There are plenty of other festive and cheap ways to protect the beer inside. Aluminum foil comes to mind. You could tear off a length, place said bottle in the middle and gently mold it around the bottle. You could even slap a sticker made from a mailing label or name tag label on it for your brewery name. Just an idea...

GL!

I did my Christmas beer in recycled champagne bottles. The labels can be a real pain to get off. Some came right off, others soaked and soaked and still had glue residue all over them. Fine if you are going to drink the beer, not so good for gifts. The caps have already been mentioned- you are going to get a mix of 26 and 29 mm bottles. It would be a good idea to split the bottles up by cap size before going in, to save you time.

I also gave away beer in Champagne bottles this year, a belgian strong dark. About half of the labels were an intense pain to get off- the overnight oxyclean soak is totally ineffective for most. I myself prefer capping the champagne bottles- it gives people a bit of a double take, and marks the contents as being beer. A new crown and caps for your capper comes out to like $5, and I love the way it looks.

I'd definitely test your paint idea. I think the beer looked great in the green bottles. Spray paint probably isn't going to come out looking as nice as you imagine. I just made some nifty labels and gluesticked them on.