Poor planning: Cap bottles with foil or bottle to growlers?

Just moved beer to the bottling bucket and primed. The bottles are all sanitized and I just noticed that I will be about about 10 caps short. I buy crowns in bulk and haven't given it a though in ages. It's 9PM and I have to decide... Should I bottle all of them and cover what I can't cap with sanitized foil until morning when I can get more crowns? Or should I move what I can't cap to a couple growlers and try to carb in there?

I would hate to deal with either a blown out growler so I'm leaning toward foil until morning.

Ideas? Please hurry!

growlers tonight...transfer to bottles CAREFULLY and cap em tomorrow. They shouldn't build up enough pressure over night to blow the growlers. anyway thats the route I would take.

OHIOSTEVE said:

growlers tonight...transfer to bottles CAREFULLY and cap em tomorrow. They shouldn't build up enough pressure over night to blow the growlers. anyway thats the route I would take.

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I would just leave whatever you can't bottle tonight in the bucket and then bottle and cap tomorrow (one less transfer to introduce oxygen). The most important thing is do not attempt to carbonate in the growlers... growlers are for carbonated beer not carbonating beer

step said:

I would just leave whatever you can't bottle tonight in the bucket and then bottle and cap tomorrow (one less transfer to introduce oxygen). The most important thing is do not attempt to carbonate in the growlers... growlers are for carbonated beer not carbonating beer

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I ended up doing a mix between this and my initial thought. I bottled a couple and covered with sanitized foil and then left the rest (~4-5 more, I think) in the bucket and will finish filling in the morning. I'll mark the bottles so I can compare them later on, but I don't expect them to be different enough for me to notice.

I hope you put the bottles you had only covered in foil into the refrigerator. Being chilled, the yeast shouldn't have done much over the 24 or so hours before capping.

One batch I had a bottle part full, and capped it anyway. Now I know what oxydation tastes like. But that conditioned for a full 4 weeks. Lesson learned, the bottom of the bottling bucket goes into the brewmaster's quality control evaluator.

RM-MN said:

I hope you put the bottles you had only covered in foil into the refrigerator. Being chilled, the yeast shouldn't have done much over the 24 or so hours before capping.

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I didn't - just left them sitting on the counter. My hope was that, if anything, any CO2 it started producing would flush out any O2 from the bottles. The risk is that the won't be enough left after I cap them to pressurize them and get some CO2 into suspension. Would have been a better experiment if I put one in the fridge, one on the counter. The beer in the bucket will be in the same boat as the bottles on the counter. Yeast will already be eating the dextrose, but the disadvantage is there is too much head room to push any O2 out of the bucket (although I suppose there's a cushion of it over the beer itself).

FWIW, my friend and I have bottled to growlers for the last dozen brews or so without incident.

drink them tonight!