Bottling question.

Just wondering your guys opinions?

I am bottling tomorrow and I have heard around to fill your bottles (I have a auto filler) and than place the cap on top but wait to allow the co2 to clear the oxygen or headspace in the bottle?

Essentially am I asking - After finish filling the bottle I dont cap it right away thanks? :rockin:

That's what I have been told and done. I fill all bottles, place caps on and crimp/cap when all bottles have been filled.

Wrong, you cap the bottles straight away. The yeast will eat the priming sugar which creates the co2 which is your carbonation.
Slainte

greenhaze said:

Wrong, you cap the bottles straight away. The yeast will eat the priming sugar which creates the co2 which is your carbonation.
Slainte

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Yeah, but the OP is talking about the CO2 production forcing out any residual oxygen before securing caps. I guess my question to that would be how much CO2 is produced during the, what, 15 minutes between your first bottle and last? And each bottle will have less time to clear O2 than the previous. You could just buy O2 absorbing caps and secure them right away.

When I used to bottle, I filled all bottles to the very tip top and capped immediately. Back then school of thought was told that you wanted the foam to go clear to the top of the bottle, making sure that any O2 was displaced.. "Cap on foam" as the saying went.. I usually ended wiping down every bottle, but always had fantastic results.. The foam subsided and left exactly enough space in the bottle..

I fill until almost at the top, withdraw the bottling wand, then set aside half a dozen to a dozen bottles to be all capped at once. The first to be filled will be exposed a lot longer than the last to be filled, and I've never had a problem with this method.

GroosBrewz said:

When I used to bottle, I filled all bottles to the very tip top and capped immediately. Back then school of thought was told that you wanted the foam to go clear to the top of the bottle, making sure that any O2 was displaced.. "Cap on foam" as the saying went.. I usually ended wiping down every bottle, but always had fantastic results.. The foam subsided and left exactly enough space in the bottle..

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If your bottling off a keg for long term storage you definately want to cap on foam if you can. But doing it with priming in bottle it wont really matter, you wont have foam to begin with, or shouldnt atleast unless your oxygenating your beer by shaking.

FuzzeWuzze said:

If your bottling off a keg for long term storage you definately want to cap on foam if you can. But doing it with priming in bottle it wont really matter, you wont have foam to begin with, or shouldnt atleast unless your oxygenating your beer by shaking.

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Ahh.. Good point.. I was referring to bottling off a keg for competitions.. Forgot about straight bottling.. Damn, too many Apfelweins I guess...

Sit the cap on after filling,pick a # when you hit that # cap them,then repeat. Find a pattern that works for you(cap every 12 pack or something). You can fill then cap right away,it just seems to slow things down to me.

I cap every bottle after it's filled, figure less chance of accidents that way.

i cap mine every 12 or so. i suppose it doesn't matter too much how long you wait, but i do mine at that frequency cuz i know if i bump one, they're ALL going down like bowling pins. if i spill any, i'd rather it was only 12 rather than the entire batch. and FWIW, jamil z says the oxygen is displaced in a very short time - don't quote me - but it's a few minutes or less.

By leaving them uncapped for a bit, you allow what co2 is in there, and/or already being produced to push out the last remaining bit of oxygen in the headpace. Sometimes you actually get a cap popping off the top of the bottle. I usually fill one case of beers, then go back and cap the first one I filled. That way they've all had an equal amount of time to vent.

whoaru99 said:

I cap every bottle after it's filled, figure less chance of accidents that way.

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Interesting. I cap them before I fill them.

I do them in sets of 6, and keep track of everything in order. The routine starts by spritzing sanitizer in and around the top of 6 bottles, lining them up to one side of my bottling bucket. I then squirt at least 6 caps with sanitizer and then begin filling bottles. I line them up on the other side of the bucket, in order. I then sanitize the next set of bottles and line them up. Then I cap the filled bottles in order, prepare more caps, fill more bottles, etc.

This gives roughly equal time for each bottle in each stage, including contact time with the sanitizer (I've been using saniclean, which has a 2-minute contact time; with starsan it'd be less of an issue). I guess the 6th bottle in a set gets about a minute less time between filling and bottling than the 1st, but it takes hours or days for the priming sugar to be exhausted. I'm pretty confident that +/- one minute in that time is irrelevant.

In fact, I worry about outgassing from the bottling bucket more than from each bottle. The last bottle is getting beer that was primed something like half an hour before the first.... However, "more" than zero is still not a lot of worrying.

I fill as many bottles as I can have in arms reach, placing an uncrimped cap on each one until I can't reach any empty bottles or I am worried about knocking over full ones. Then I crimp all of the ones I have filled. This usually means I do about 10-15 at a time. If I have someone to help me with the bottling then I just fill and pass them off to be crimped right away.

I fill around 30 to 40 bottles cause that's all I can move around then cap. Never had an issue

zeg said:

Interesting. I cap them before I fill them.

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Interesting. I don't care much for light beer.