Hot Glue bottle wax experiment

mcbaumannerb said:

I used my side burner on the grill in a soup can and that worked like a charm. Once I added the crayon and smelled the result, I was glad I was outside!

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Great idea! Another reason to get outside and grill. Thanks Mark

Mark, we are about due for another Homebrew beer mail swap

Just waxed and labelled my pumpkin porter yesterday. Now I just have to wait for it to carbonate! :beard:

mcbaumannerb said:

Just waxed and labelled my pumpkin porter yesterday. Now I just have to wait for it to carbonate! :beard:

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Damn those look good Mark! Nice work

Goooood lookin'!

How difficult is everyone finding the wax to take off? I waxed some bottles with 1 crayon: 4"x.44" gluestick and I find them very difficult to get off. I do like the looks of them though!

I'm using a wax cutting knife (from a corkscrew) to cut the wax when opening and that is working fine . Then I use it to slide behind the wax and cut upward to get it to release from the neck. So far it's working well for me. I did the 1 crayon per 2 glue sticks though so the extra glue may make your wax harder to work.

I am going to wax a bourbon barrel stout in a few weeks and reading through this thread and based on my trials it is hard to get off the wax. Has anyone ever tried to use pinstriping tape around the bottle similar to markers mark? http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/d...oap?ck=Search_N2512_-1_274&pt=N2512&ppt=C2390
This is 40 feet on 1/16" tape for 3 bucks. I figure it is worth a shot.

jvotava91 said:

I am going to wax a bourbon barrel stout in a few weeks and reading through this thread and based on my trials it is hard to get off the wax. Has anyone ever tried to use pinstriping tape around the bottle similar to markers mark? http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/d...oap?ck=Search_N2512_-1_274&pt=N2512&ppt=C2390
This is 40 feet on 1/16" tape for 3 bucks. I figure it is worth a shot.

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Makers lines up the tape with where the cap meets the bottle neck. That'd be hard to do with beer. Are you going to put it directly under the cap?

Im not sure where the best spot to put it. Maybe but the tape on before capping the beer all together to make it easier? I may play around with it a little bit tomorrow with some beer I have already bottled. I will report my findings.

At the bottom of the cap so it peels away the wax making room for a bottle opener. Barrel Aged Abraxas has that on it:

skeezerpleezer said:

At the bottom of the cap so it peels away the wax making room for a bottle opener. Barrel Aged Abraxas has that on it:
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Awesome. Thats exactly what I was thinking. Maybe I dont have to do a test run afterall

I would put the top of the tape on the bottom of the cap. Maybe make 2 layers, in case the tape is weak to prevent tearing. If it's the tape with nylon strings you should be good with 1.

Thread necro here...

I dug through this a bit and never found much info on weight ratios; a little bit, but the few relevant posts were a bit contradictory.

Anyway, I got around to waxing my RIS tonight. My glue sticks are 11mm diameter and 200mm long, and my crayons broken castoffs from my job as a kindergarten teacher, so I went by weight rather than number. 215 g glue to 80 g crayons gave me what seems to be a very good facsimile of, say, Maker's Mark wax in consistency and ease of removal, color notwithstanding since I just grabbed crayons in random handfuls to get my weight.

Interestingly, the color of the finished product varies a bit based on the heat of the wax at application. In the case of my randomly mixed grayish mess, the hotter bottles have a darker, slightly green tint not really distinguishable in the picture.

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Nice info, and good looking wax. That being said in my own tinkering I found that high of a glue ratio to be hell to get off come drinking time. It's pretty but I can't get through it with a bottle opener. For a more user friendly experience, I thinned it way down with paraffin. The finish isn't so glossy or lucious looking but it will give way to an opener a lot easier.

JNewbs said:

Nice info, and good looking wax. That being said in my own tinkering I found that high of a glue ratio to be hell to get off come drinking time. It's pretty but I can't get through it with a bottle opener. For a more user friendly experience, I thinned it way down with paraffin. The finish isn't so glossy or lucious looking but it will give way to an opener a lot easier.

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I tried tearing the wax off of a bottle to get to the cap and it came off a treat. It took a couple seconds to get the initial tear, but once I had broken it open, it peeled off nicely in one big piece. The bonus is that if I hold on to those, I can heat them up in the can again for future reuse.

Had some extra volume from a batch a few weeks ago so I figured I'd bottle and try this waxing method. I'm pretty happy with how easy it was. I used 4 crayons and 8 sticks of glue to make this. I probably could've done another have dozen bottles, with what's left.

It'll work well for the RIS I'll be bottling for aging in a few weeks.

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You've gone through the trouble to wax the tops but don't remove the old lables? Can I get a wtf?

butterpants said:

You've gone through the trouble to wax the tops but don't remove the old lables? Can I get a wtf?

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Yeah, what a lazy jerk right? I mean, who would even do something like that?

don't scroll up four or five posts...

HA is this thread littered with the semi-lazy? I haven't rolled through it in a while. Gotta admit, it's kinda a strange juxtaposition of detail, care, presentation and being a lazy slob

butterpants said:

HA is this thread littered with the semi-lazy? I haven't rolled through it in a while. Gotta admit, it's kinda a strange juxtaposition of detail, care, presentation and being a lazy slob

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In my case, it was cleaning five cases of nasty bar bottles all at once. I don't have a big tub to soak them, and I didn't want to be at it for six hours, so I triaged the parts of the process that weren't crucial to bottling my beer. Before waxing, I made sure all of the neck labels had been removed, but I'll deal with the remains of the bigger labels some other time; probably half a dozen at a time as I give them out/drink them. Any beer I finish that still has part of its label remaining gets a full cleaning after pouring, so once the bottles have been used and emptied once, they're good.

There's a political element, as well. Two hours cleaning bottles from the bar is acceptable to my wife. Much more than that gets me in trouble.

No tub sucks.... though about a large rubbermaid storage container? Pretty cheap. I couldn't imagine doing labels without a long soak in pbw.

Yep I get the wifey thing...

I use a big cooler with a PBW solution. I can't do multiple cases at once, but I can do pretty big batches, let them sit until the labels fall right off, then add more. It takes many days, but not many minutes of work on my part.

PBW is ~$2 an ounce here in China because it's all imported small-scale by homebrew shops. I can't even find good oxy-clean here: the stuff I tried had a strong detergent smell and while my Chinese is good, it's not good enough to read the ingredients on a package of Chinese Oxy-clean knock-off, so I have no idea how closely it adheres to what US brewers are using.

FatDragon said:

PBW is ~$2 an ounce here in China because it's all imported small-scale by homebrew shops. I can't even find good oxy-clean here: the stuff I tried had a strong detergent smell and while my Chinese is good, it's not good enough to read the ingredients on a package of Chinese Oxy-clean knock-off, so I have no idea how closely it adheres to what US brewers are using.

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Whoa! I was going to suggest Oxyclean as an alternative... I will say that if you have a way to easily wash the bottles after delabeling with normal dish detergent, e.g. a dishwasher, it doesn't really matter what is in the Oxyclean, so long as you wear gloves and don't inhale it. If you don't have an easy way to clean them after a soak, then we're not really saving labor anymore.

With the trial run behind me and the final batch bottled, I finished waxing these tonight. My little tribute, making a fantastic stout to compliment an amazing band. Sure, they'll never see it, but I'm happy with the finished product. Only thing left now is letting it age until this Christmas.

Thank you Grogtag, and thank you HBT for making all this wonderful info available to the masses.

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Those look really nice!

Thanks. By the way, my trial run of 4 crayons to 8 glue sticks was not the best ratio. The wax was very difficult to peel off. This time, I went with more of a ratio as the OP suggested, using 9 crayons and 15 glue sticks. I'll update the results in a few months, when I crack one open.

Lgaddy44 said:

Thanks. By the way, my trial run of 4 crayons to 8 glue sticks was not the best ratio. The wax was very difficult to peel off. This time, I went with more of a ratio as the OP suggested, using 9 crayons and 15 glue sticks. I'll update the results in a few months, when I crack one open.

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Do you have any idea how much your crayons and glue sticks weigh, to give a better idea of the ratio for those of us who don't necessarily use the same glue sticks and crayons as the majority here seem to use?

Crayon is 10g, and glue stick is also 10g. I think those may be a bit different than some of the other calculations I've seen earlier in this thread. I'm not claiming my ratio to be successful yet, it's just what i went with.

Lgaddy44 said:

With the trial run behind me and the final batch bottled, I finished waxing these tonight. My little tribute, making a fantastic stout to compliment an amazing band. Sure, they'll never see it, but I'm happy with the finished product. Only thing left now is letting it age until this Christmas.

Thank you Grogtag, and thank you HBT for making all this wonderful info available to the masses.

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Clutch :rockin:

Just thought I would throw my experience in the mix. Using some of the other posts I went with a mixture that was about 30% crayon and 70% glue stick by weight. I found a standard crayon weighs about 4.7 grams and a .44" x 10" glue stick weighs 24.7 grams. I used 11g of wax per ~25g of glue for the 30% wax mixture (11/(11+25)). This is roughly 7 crayons and 3 glue sticks, or (33/(33+74.1)) = 30.8% wax mixture.

I tired 7 removal methods which consisted of no assistance (straight dip), full piece of masking tape wrapped around the neck, half piece of masking around the neck, floss taped to the cap then wrapped around and over, floss wrapped with no tape, duct tape wrapped around the neck, and duct tape going vertically across the crown. Of the tests I found the duct tape vertically across the cap to work best. I tore 1/4" strips about 4" long and placed them below the crown on the glass then over the cap and down the side of the bottle. I then folded the tape inside on itself for a pull tab.

The next time I do it I will use a deeper can with more mixture, and longer strips to be able to dip the bottles deeper.

The green topped bottles are 18 months old and I had 2 of the seals leak once they hit the hot wax.

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Nice testing Heritage, looks nice (though I agree, a deeper can will work better) I found taking a can opener to a soda can worked really well and was disposable. Soup can would work too.

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Did this for an exchange I'm doing where we all picked one BrewDog recipe.

Turned out ok but I should have used a different twine/rope for it. I like the rustic look of it but it's showing through the wax in places.

The recipe I picked was "how to disappear completely" a radiohead song so I'm hoping to get a nice Stanley donwood piece on for a label.

Great thread! I love the creative repurposing of misc ordinary goods most of us have lying around the house.

I'm looking to seal some bottles for a couple of reasons:

1. I have some homebrew meads and wines that I had to use T-corks on since I don't have a corker and also because some of them are in screw-type champagne bottles (I don't have the caps). T-corks don't make a great seal so I'm concerned with oxidation over the a 2+ year storage time.

2. I have a number of nicer bottles of liquor like single malt Scotch whiskey, bourbon, and port which I'd like to keep around for a good number of years before drinking them.

My main concern here is reducing oxygen exposure and evaporation over time. I've read quite a bit about very slow leakage and evaporation through corks over long periods. Some even say that ambient smells will leech into the bottles over time and recommend you never use aerosols around your collection or store your bottles in cardboard (including the boxes whiskey may come in for example.)

While I have to say many of the pictures posted in this thread look completely awesome, I'm not really that concerned with making beautiful looking bottles (yet -- I will definitely try this at some point). Inspired by the OP's use of hot glue, I thought perhaps just ringing the T-corks with hot glue directly might have the same protecting effect. If there are any chemists out there, is there any way to tell whether hot glue is gas-permeable? Would the addition of wax increase/decrease the permeability? Or is all of this really more for aesthetics?

And one question to those that have stored bottles long-term and drank them -- have you noticed any off tastes/smells leeching in from the smell of the crayon/glue mixture? (I read it was a pretty bad smell when melting. I would be more concerned about this with corks than with caps.)

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, hot glue is at least somewhat gas permeable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-melt_adhesive

"EVAs are optically clearer and more gas and vapor permeable than polyolefins."

"Resistance to water and solvents is critical in some applications. For example, in textile industry, resistance to dry cleaning solvents may be required. Permeability to gases and water vapor may or may not be desirable."

And an interesting article about gas permeability of corks and questions about silicone and paraffin wax permeability:

https://oxidised-burgs.wikispaces.com/Corks

"Again according to Wikipedia, the solid forms of paraffin, called paraffin wax, are from the heaviest molecules from C20 to C40. Paraffin is also widely described to be gas permeable, but I could never quite find out how gas permeable the solid (wax) forms are."

"So maybe silicone coatings are more gas permeable than paraffin coatings, but how much more permeable are they? And what is the ultimate significance to the oxidation debate? At this point it is still unclear."