Batch (water bath) pasteurizing: submerge bottles over cap?

[Ike]

I cruised around the forum and Googled a bit and didn't find an answer to this one. Looking at Google Images seemed to give me a mixed bag of results, so I thought I'd pull the trigger and start a new thread; also doing so to keep the other pasteurizing threads on-topic. The official question:

When batch pasteurizing your cider (or any other beverage) do you only submerge your bottles to the level of liquid in the bottle, or are your bottles and caps completely dunked?

So far, I've only been submerging the bottles to the point that the caps are about 1" out of the water. This feels like the right thing to do, but when I ask myself "why?" I can't come up with a good reason. Water isn't going to get in. I guess my main concern would be that directly heating the caps may lead to the rubber on the underside getting soft enough that they could leak gas or liquid.

It's an issue for me because it's a hassle for me to carefully place them in the bath so none fall over, and I'm hoping to move to a turkey fryer setup where I can use the basket to more quickly load a larger number of bottles. Having a larger bath (one that completely submerges the bottles) will allow for a bigger source of heat.

Thanks for weighing in!

 

[RPh_Guy]

You're definitely overthinking this.

The liquid inside the bottles reaching the target temperature is what matters. Whether they're mostly submerged or fully submerged doesn't matter.

Good luck!

 

[ebbelwoi]

I would think submerging the bottles completely would make them slightly more buoyant, since there's gas at the top. No idea whether that would translate to anything, though.

 

[RPh_Guy]

It's really not that complicated, I promise!

 

[chevalcider]

I will say that I’m so glad I have taken a preference to dry cider. I pasteurized my first batch of sweetened cider and I didn’t enjoy the process very much!