Alternative corking techniques

smashed4 · Aug 13, 2009

Anybody ever tried alternative corking techniques? I mean different strategy than the belgian bottle, mushroom cork + wire hood?

I had some old #9 wine corks and different kinds of belgian bottles and tried to cork them with my hand corker. To my surprise it was a tight fit..

I am thinking of corking one or two belgian bottles with the #9 corks + waxing it or using a shrink wrapper and see if it holds pressure as an experiment. My inspiration for this is the old English bottled ales (~1900 bottles) I've seen pictures off that were corked and waxed.

I think that if it holds pressure, it would be pretty cool, original and cheap!

Boar Beer · Aug 13, 2009

We have used regular wine corks (not sure or the number) and champagne bottles. Just make sure that the bottles you are using are made for pressure

smashed4 · Aug 13, 2009

Great. Did you use a wire hood on the champagne bottle?

I would suspect that any technique used for champagne would also work for beer as champagne is such an highly carbonated drink..

beeraroundtown · Aug 13, 2009

Fantome uses the wine corks then puts a cap over the top of them, you could do that.

Orangevango · Aug 13, 2009

you could just get a little dutch boy to stick his finger in the hole.

smashed4 · Aug 15, 2009

OK so I decided to try it!

Since i don't want to waste any good beer, I thought of doing a little experiment.

I brewed 3L (~1gal) of green tea, added 40grams of regular table sugar, cooled it down and mixed in 5gr of dried champagne yeast. This amount of sugar should produce about 3.5 - 4 volumes of CO2, since I wanted to test the worst case scenario..

I bottled in 4 bottles:

2 belgian 750ml bottles, corked with #9 agglomerated wine corks. Cork is inserted all the way down like a wine bottle.
1 660ml (22oz) regular bottle capped with a crown cap.
1 340ml (12oz) regular bottle capped with a crown cap.

The 2 capped bottles will act as control. This way, if the corked bottles are leaking CO2, I will be able to tell by comparing to the control, capped bottles which I know should not be leaking.

For this experiment, I am not holding the corks in place with anything. I will store the bottles in a box to avoid any mess should the corks pop-out.

I made 2 test bottles and 2 control bottles. I plan on opening a corked and a capped bottle in 3 weeks, and another set in 3 months, to see if the corks are also good for longer term storage.

I'll update the thread with the results if anyone is interested..