I'm still doing exclusively bottling until I get a kegerator set up early next year. I know most brewers absolutely loathe the whole process and I thought I'd share some little techniques that help cut the time down a bit. Right now it takes me maybe 90min from rinsing the bottling bucket to having everything capped.
When filling bottles, I've found its best to do batches of like 24 beers. I take 4 6pack carriers and fill them from the bottles on the tree (tree made things much easier and faster btw) and just fill all of them with one hand and lay a cap on top of each with the other. I've found this is much faster than filling then capping each beer by itself.
Once I've got all the caps laying on the bottles, I arrange them in a staggered fashion seen here. Half of them are inside the cartons for stability and the other half are spaced apart outside. This arrangement lets me use my red capper thing to reach each bottle without hitting the surrounding ones. I don't need to touch any of the bottles, its just boom boom boom down the line. I cap the outside ones first then go for the ones in the carton. I'd say the hole capping process for ~50 beers (5 gal batch) takes me no more than 2 minutes.
When filling bottles, I've found its best to do batches of like 24 beers. I take 4 6pack carriers and fill them from the bottles on the tree (tree made things much easier and faster btw) and just fill all of them with one hand and lay a cap on top of each with the other. I've found this is much faster than filling then capping each beer by itself.
Once I've got all the caps laying on the bottles, I arrange them in a staggered fashion seen here. Half of them are inside the cartons for stability and the other half are spaced apart outside. This arrangement lets me use my red capper thing to reach each bottle without hitting the surrounding ones. I don't need to touch any of the bottles, its just boom boom boom down the line. I cap the outside ones first then go for the ones in the carton. I'd say the hole capping process for ~50 beers (5 gal batch) takes me no more than 2 minutes.