I want to build a bottling robot thingy...

I'm getting back into the hobby.

The thing I dislike most about brewing is bottling. I like (love, actually) everything else.

I like to age and carbonate in kegs. And I hate bottling from kegs.

Any ideas on what a person could build to (semi) automate the whole bottling process ?

Get your bottling bucket up high, and attach your bottling wand to a length of tubing. That way, you just arrange your bottles, and go from one to the next with the bottling wand.

Though the idea of a homemade bottling robot is cool... Personally, I'd go with a motorized programmed arm, that takes the bottle from the supply area, pushes it up onto the bottling wand, and then moves it over to a bench capper. You'd need some background in programming, but not too much.

I was thinking something more along the lines of a line of bottles that moved 1 bottle at a time with stations for purging, filling and capping, all mostly automatic.

Basically put a clean bottle into one end of the line and get a full, capped bottle out the other end.

Use an air cylinder to press the cap on. Use an air cylinder to put the purge/filling tree into the bottle. Use solenoids to turn the CO2, vent and beer flow on and off.

I have an electronics/controls background.

Sounds like it would work, though the hardest part I think would be moving the bottles from one station to the next, which is why I suggested the arm.

Another idea is to use a big gear to move the bottles around in a circle, with the different stations around the circle. Would probably be a lot cheaper than the arm, but not be as geeky.

Sounds like you've got the correct background, at least. Electronics Tech in the Navy, myself.

Think of a Reloading rig. bottle stays put, but the actions change. bottle moves into position. wand rig moves into position and fills then retracts, gizmo rotates, slap cap on, capper comes down and caps.

...or,
time gizmo so all actions require same amount of time. that way each station has a bottle and each time the gizmo is energized it is moving a bottle up, filling another and capping still another.

I think you'd want to have some sort of float sensor on the bottle wand, though, as fill rates will probably vary slightly as you progress. Wouldn't want to spill any beer, now would we?

As far as timing, I wouldn't even use any timing controls. The capping will probably be faster than filling, so I'd set up triggers based on the filling:
When gear finishes moving a step, stop gear, move wand down
When float triggers, move wand up
When wand is up, move gear.
repeat. Easy enough to set up with a few pushbuttons.

(darn it, now I want to build one, too... see what you've started?)

RockSlice said:

I think you'd want to have some sort of float sensor on the bottle wand, though, as fill rates will probably vary slightly as you progress. Wouldn't want to spill any beer, now would we?

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Have you seen a float switch small enough to fit inside the neck of a bottle? I looked around for a while, but never found anything.

I had a few prototypes of bottle filler stands at various points. The idea was to have six or so nozzles that would take a bottle and then fill to the appropriate level automatically, and then I'd pull them off and cap manually. In the end, I was never able to get something that made sense for only 50 bottles at a time, but perhaps you'll have better luck.

If you really want to go all-in, there's something like this:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okKvc1mrxwM]Bottling homebrew - YouTube[/ame]

RockSlice said:

(darn it, now I want to build one, too... see what you've started?)

Click to expand...

That is the point !

I'm not sure if I would build this thing for myself or if I would build it for our club. I think it would save a lot of time, especially if you had 3 or 4 kegs to bottle.

How many bottles an hour would it do ? 15 seconds a bottle ? 20 seconds ?

MalFet said:

If you really want to go all-in, there's something like this:
Bottling homebrew - YouTube

Click to expand...

Exactly. Something like that. But more compact and a bit faster. It should be capping a bottle while another one is filling.

Does one really need the belt ? Or could bottles push each other. Ie the insertion of a bottle into the queue moves all the other bottles one step further.

Question. Why do all the beer controllers operate from little LCD screens when its easy to put a USB port on a micro controller and nearly everyone has a laptop these days ?

brewman ! said:

I think it would save a lot of time, especially if you had 3 or 4 kegs to bottle.

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There is zero chance that building something like this will save you time. It never does. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but c'mon dude. How' long does it take to bottle a batch of beer? 20 minutes. How long is it going to take to design, build, and troubleshoot something like this? Hundreds of hours.

Maybe of interest:
Bottling For The Future

It isn't going to take me hundreds of hours to build this thing.

And if we ever get a good design, building the second one will take a lot less time.

And it might not just be for me. It might be for our club.

I hate bottling. It takes me way longer than 20 minutes to bottle a batch. Maybe that is my problem ? 20 minutes / 60 ish bottles = 20 seconds per bottle. I'd say it takes me an hour.

brewman ! said:

It takes me way longer than 20 minutes to bottle a batch. Maybe that is my problem ? 20 minutes / 60 ish bottles = 20 seconds per bottle. I'd say it takes me an hour.

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On top of that, now you can wander away and pretty much automate another brew while this one is bottling... Genius!

DamageCT said:

On top of that, now you can wander away and pretty much automate another brew while this one is bottling... Genius!

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Or clean kegs. Or clean bottles. Or rack a fermentation.

I have lots of other things to do with my brewing time other than waiting for a filler to fill a bottle.

brewman ! said:

It isn't going to take me hundreds of hours to build this thing.

And if we ever get a good design, building the second one will take a lot less time.

And it might not just be for me. It might be for our club.

I hate bottling. It takes me way longer than 20 minutes to bottle a batch. Maybe that is my problem ? 20 minutes / 60 ish bottles = 20 seconds per bottle. I'd say it takes me an hour.

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If that's the case, more power to ya. For the numbers to play out like that, though, you must be really good at engineering and really bad at bottling

There are some fairly technical considerations here, though, not least of which are the ones on the page DeafSmith linked. Bottle movement and electronic control are the least of your concerns. Perhaps you've considered all of this stuff, and if so I'd love to hear about your plans. Personally, I was never really able to make it work. For starters, how would you automate bottle filling? None of the solutions used by the microbrew bottlers are really feasible at a 5gal scale, particularly once you figure in cleaning time, etc.

What is wrong with inserting the filler tree with an air cylinder like is done in the video above ?

brewman ! said:

What is wrong with inserting the filler tree with an air cylinder like is done in the video above ?

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What would you do to control liquid levels? Timer? Sensor? Pre-chamber? I can't really make out what he does on the video for this, but his levels seem to vary considerably from bottle to bottle.

MalFet said:

What would you do to control liquid levels? Timer? Sensor? Pre-chamber?

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I don't have that part figured out yet.

Weight would be most accurate, but you'd have to weight the entire assembly or figure out how to subtract the force of the bottling tee pushing down on the bottle.

This is why we have this thread.

brewman ! said:

I don't have that part figured out yet.

Weight would be most accurate, but you'd have to weight the entire assembly or figure out how to subtract the force of the bottling tee pushing down on the bottle.

This is why we have this thread.

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Indeedaroo. I don't mean to sound negative. I'm all for your trying to make this thing work, if only because another set of eyes on the problem will perhaps solve problems that I couldn't. But, the difficulties I ran into as I went were definitely not the ones I was expecting when I started.

Getting a consistent automatic fill level turns out to be non-trivial. I played with weight for a while, but I had to fill very slowly and recalibrate constantly in order to keep the force of the incoming beer, the position of the filling apparatus, and variation between bottles (even of the same type) from mucking with the reading in unpredictable ways. The difference between a well filled bottle and a poorly filled bottle is small enough that you need fairly tight tolerances. The most promising option I found was to use a peristaltic pump on a timer. In any case, don't let my naysaying stop you. Just trying to offer a heads-up.

What about on your bottling wand you use diodes (I think that's the right term) essentially having a small gap that when the beer is filled to a certain amount it closes that gap to trigger the wand to lift.

Here's an idea: between the bottling bucket and the wand have a reservoir big enough for one bottle. Have the valve going to it close as the wand comes down, and not open again until the wand is back up.

That way, you just calibrate it once, fairly simply, and get the same volume for every bottle. It may cause an issue if you have bottles of slightly different sizes (12.3 oz vs 12.0 oz), but if you use the same style of bottle, individual differences would be negligible.

Another benefit is that your fill time per bottle will be consistent, and not increase as you reach the end of the batch. (as long as the reservoir is being filled fast enough)

pjmlez said:

What about on your bottling wand you use diodes (I think that's the right term) essentially having a small gap that when the beer is filled to a certain amount it closes that gap to trigger the wand to lift.

Click to expand...

That would just be a conductive switch. It's certainly used in many applications, and potentially could work here. I couldn't get it to be responsive enough with a solenoid valve, but perhaps I was just doing it wrong.

RockSlice said:

Here's an idea: between the bottling bucket and the wand have a reservoir big enough for one bottle. Have the valve going to it close as the wand comes down, and not open again until the wand is back up.

That way, you just calibrate it once, fairly simply, and get the same volume for every bottle. It may cause an issue if you have bottles of slightly different sizes (12.3 oz vs 12.0 oz), but if you use the same style of bottle, individual differences would be negligible.

Another benefit is that your fill time per bottle will be consistent, and not increase as you reach the end of the batch. (as long as the reservoir is being filled fast enough)

Click to expand...

That's definitely a promising approach, and one that's used on a lot of the professional systems. The hoses get a bit complicated because you need to let air into and out of the pre-chamber without having it bubble through your main reservoir every time. Perhaps with a good CO2 flush it'd be easier.

The beer bottling automated process is one of the oldest automated assembly line processes in the history of the industrialized age. Perhaps the only one older than that was the process for making beer bottles. So there's plenty of information out there on how it can be done.

Go to a McDonald's and watch how their automated cup system fills sodas for customers.

Have a loop of cups that hold the beer bottles.

Put the beer bottle in a cup, or have a hopper system that loads the beer bottles into the cups.

Cup moves down to the next station. Bottle filler goes in, begins to fill the bottle with beer. Electronic eye cuts off the flow of beer when the beer gets to the right level. As the dip tube leaves the bottle a spritz of CO2 is added to fill the headspace of the bottle. Onto the next station.

Pneumatic bottle capper gets loaded with a bottle cap and the bottle moves under the capper. Capper presses down. Onto the next station.

Bottle goes through a mildly warm water shower to rinse off any overspill. Onto next station.

Finished bottle is back at the beginning of the loop. Remove the bottle and replace it with an empty bottle.

Did you want the sanitizing process included in your process?

MalFet said:

That's definitely a promising approach, and one that's used on a lot of the professional systems. The hoses get a bit complicated because you need to let air into and out of the pre-chamber without having it bubble through your main reservoir every time. Perhaps with a good CO2 flush it'd be easier.

Click to expand...

Only if the pre-chamber was rigid... if it was a flexible "bladder" type chamber, it would still be able to drain and refill without any air hose attachment.

RockSlice said:

Only if the pre-chamber was rigid... if it was a flexible "bladder" type chamber, it would still be able to drain and refill without any air hose attachment.

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Even better would be a 12oz SS piston of some sort, as the motion up and down could drive the liquid both in and out. I've been on the lookout for something like this, but haven't seen anything.

brewman ! said:

I'm getting back into the hobby.
And I hate bottling from kegs.

Any ideas on what a person could build to (semi) automate the whole bottling process ?

Click to expand...

My 1995 museums piece started as a rotary filler with crowning station, hard to impossible to modify.
Can't add stations without building new star wheel, etc.
My hobby fill line used to be a three conveyor system, in-feed, fill and out-feed conveyor with crowning station.
No pressure bowl or pump required, Corny is the pressure bowl.

Capping was done on foam with a burst of CO2 after filling.

The only thing what's left is the filler section which I changed to an in-line filler, easy to add stations.







Very old low res videos.

Two bottles must be present before the filling starts and no bottles can be at the conveyor full sensor.

Filling demo


Conveyor full demo



One more museums piece, 5L semi automatic keg filler with bung inserter.

DamageCT said:

On top of that, now you can wander away and pretty much automate another brew while this one is bottling... Genius!

Click to expand...

Not really, unless you design in an accumulation table for filled and capped bottles.
If you have to go back to the filler for each bottle automation makes no sense to me.

brewman ! said:

It isn't going to take me hundreds of hours to build this thing.

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Build one


Cheers,
ClaudiusB

brewman ! said:

I hate bottling. It takes me way longer than 20 minutes to bottle a batch. Maybe that is my problem ? 20 minutes / 60 ish bottles = 20 seconds per bottle. I'd say it takes me an hour.

Click to expand...

But if you build your totally automated bottling line, how long will it take you to set up before bottling, then clean the equipment after bottling?

What I'd like to have is a mostly manual system with just a little automation. For example, if you had a fixture on which you place a bottle, then manually operate a lever to lower the bottling wand/stopper into the bottle, then press a button and the machine automatically purges, fills, and releases pressure, then you manually operate the lever to lift the wand and manually cap the bottle (with two people, one could be filling the bottles and the other capping). This might be easily done just by building the fixture to raise and lower the wand and modifying a standard CPBF (motors to operate the beer and CO2 valves and the pressure bleedoff valve, and a sensor to detect when the bottle is full). This simplifies the procedure for the operator and speeds up the operation due to optimum filling time on each bottle - and should reduce the chances for operator error (operating valves at the wrong time or in the wrong sequence). After everything is working properly, setup and cleanup for each batch should be no more complicated than for a standard CPBF.

I'm off to a beer club meeting. Great thread.

Better than a peristaltic pump on a timer would be a peristaltic pump with a rotary encoder. They are good for some pressure too. I just happen to have one.

DeafSmith said:

But if you build your totally automated bottling line, how long will it take you to set up before bottling, then clean the equipment after bottling?

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The only thing that touches the beer is the counter pressure tree and the bottle cap, just like on a manual system.

Now if you asked how much storage space it might take when not in use, that has me concerned.

Great thread, people. Keep the ideas, vids and pics coming.

Never mind the bottling robot. I figured something else out for beer storage. I'll post about it when I get it working.

brewman ! said:

Never mind the bottling robot. I figured something else out for beer storage. I'll post about it when I get it working.

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Kegging?

What was that idea