DIY belgian corker

Thought I would post this, as I've used it several times now. This is made of scrap plywood, and a couple of blocks of scape cedar (its what I had) The aluminum piece on the top is held down with 3x 1.25 inch screws. Its job is to limits how far down the cheap corker pushes in the cork.

This is the base




The cork loaded (it takes a bit to get it started, lube with a little star-san)
You can see the line on the corker where I measured-- 1/2 inch up from the maximum insertion of the corker.


Its a little difficult to see, but I've pushed the cork in, and the upper piece has hit the aluminum support, stopping further movement




Now I put the bottom of the corker up on the aluminum (bottle is held up by the corker)



and push the cork the rest of the way out of the corker:


Ready for a wire basket.

I'm not sure I would want to do an entire case this way--takes almost all of my weight to push the cork in at the start. But for recycling 1-2 belgian bottles each time I'm bottling, it works OK.

my cost was the corker, which was somewhere around $4-5. Everything else was laying around the garage.

tim

Forgot to mention measurements--the upper side of the aluminum (or what ever you are using), needs to be 11 inches above the base for standard belgian bottles.



tim

Cool.

I was looking into this...

wine corks get moistened during storage, what about Belgians do you store it wet?

That's a great idea!

Cool idea! Where did you come up with the heavy aluminum piece? How thick is it?

If you were going to bottle a full batch, it wouldn't be too hard to extend up the sides of the box, put a crossbrace between them, then use that as the fulcrum for a lever (a piece of 2x4?) to press on the corker.