Belgian bottle corking with a wing style corker?

[S_carve]

I have bottles and can buy the corks and bails, but dont want to buy a corker. My mom makes wine and has a wing style corker. Will this work?

I tried a search and everyone seems to use the floor or bench style ones. I did find a thread that ends with a pic of the corker i have and the same question but no one replied with an answer.

Thanks

 

[ACbrewer]

If I understand your question, you are trying to put what looks like a champagne style cork (ie cork is 1/2 inside and 1/2 out with a basket over the cork)....

To do that you have to have a corker that will do that, the standard wine corker is desinged to put a smaller sized cork all the way in.

 

[BigRob]

I have plastic champagne corks that are a pain to ram in, but don't require a corker, used them on a barleywine I made a while back, twisted the bailing wires over top of them. Seem to work.

 

[S_carve]

yes. I am trying to cork belgian bottles with real corks. Can the cheap wing style corker work? I guess youe would just have to check and make sure the cork doesn't go all the way in.

 

[smokinghole]

I would say no but you don't know until you give it a shot. If you're serious about wanting to cork and cage bottles you will want to drop the coin on a corker. Trust me, I did and it was completely worth the money.

 

[nebben]

My answer is maybe.

I gathered a few Belgian bottles that had the mushroomed cork/cage treatment that I had been collecting from commercial brews. I bought more Belgian sized corks than I needed at the time, since I didn't know how they would work out with my hand-held Gilda corker (not quite a wing corker). I put some corks in a pot of water, boiled them for a few minutes, then picked one out and compressed it with the corker and tried to get it pushed part way in. I did this a couple times before I destroyed the cork when I was trying to remove it to try again.

Ultimately, I felt that in practice I could do it and knew about how far to insert the cork since it can't be seen during the actual corking process.

On bottling day, it worked out perfectly. Since the corks were wet already from being boiled and sitting in a simmering pot, they were even easier to insert than during the testing session (still hard though).

YMMV. Good luck!

 

[smokinghole]

Also don't worry too much about pushing the cork in too far. Once you throw the cage on the cork will push itself out to the cage and then mushroom itself. Something I've noticed since I started corking bottles is that you need to leave them upright for a little bit then stick them on their sides. That helps with corks sealing and mushrooming. For whatever reason the corks don't really seem to put out or mushroom until I put them on their side. Something I did notice though is that the corks I ordered from St Pats are 25.5mm corks. They seem a touch fatter than the corks I bought from Austin Homebrew. They seem to seal better and allow for less beer seepage around the cork/bottle mouth. My tripel all have a touch of beer that seeped out which has stopped since the corks mushroomed better.

 

[ACbrewer]

@smokinghole - when corked, the CO2 will get out of the bottle - if the bottle is up right, - this will even happen if you have flat beer and just put in the cork. When wine is bottled, the instructions are to let the bottles sit upright for like 3 days to let the air out.

When tiped on their side, the air will force the corks out - imagine if you have CO2 behind that, and spilled beer (or wine - this has happened to me!) BUT the beer or wine keeps the cork moist when it is on it's side.

 

[JetSmooth]

You can't really use a wing capper. A Colona capper is what you're looking for. It compresses the cork through a small funnel so it'll fit into the mouth of the bottle. I can't see what a wing capper will do for you there.

See the thread in my sig for a photo step by step.

 

[smokinghole]

Yeah that's what I figured. Good to have a confirmation to what I noticed happening. I did a wine kit and although it said to leave them up right for a while I didn't exactly know why. Well back on their side my tripels go. I just rinsed the corks off because of seepage and it seems to have done the trick now that the corks are fully mushroomed.