Bottling with a busted corker

[warnk]

I went to bottle up a couple gallons of apfelwein on sunday and sure enough, my corker broke after I already filled up all the bottles. To be fair, it was one of those two piece, plastic POS. A poor man pays twice indeed...

So, half of the bottles are corked with mangled corks, the other half are sitting on my desk covered with sanitized foil, and boy does my palm hurt.

So my LHBS is closed until tomorrow, are my makeshift foil-caps okay until I can cork, or should I not even bother storing it corked at this point?

 

[Revvy]

What kind of corks are you using? Plastic? You could try a rubber mallet. What kind of bottles are you using? Will they take a crown cap? Can you temporarily cap them with beercaps til tomorrow? Or use bottle caps? I have champange bottles for my ciders and they take regular crown caps, so I tend just to use them.

 

[warnk]

I'm using #8 agglomerated corks on leftover commercial wine bottles. I tried bottle caps on a couple bottles, even though there is no lip on the bottles, hoping they had enough grip to stay put, but I almost broke the capper too.

I'll give the sledgehammer idea a try tonight. I'll definitely be sticking with champagne bottles for my next batch.

 

[warnk]

The winning combo was a pair of pliers to compress the corks and a sledgehammer to mash 'em in.

 

[sudbuster]

What's wrong with a NEW corker???

 

[samc]

What's wrong with a NEW corker???

I'm guessing "So my LHBS is closed until tomorrow" covers that.

 

[Megaross]

I used a plank of wood, drilled a largeish hole halfway through to hold the cork a bit. Then chewed the end of the cork a tiny bit to get it started, used the wood and mallet to drive the corks home.

Don't ever lend your corker to a mate for more than a day I found, forgot he had it, syphoned off and couldn't flaming cork it so fashioned my own "ghetto" version.