mainefiddler
Member
OK, so I've had a very interesting first bottling day. As I was bottling my first brew, I struggled a lot to get my black, no name, "Made in Italy" bottle capper to fully crimp my caps. As I tried to re-crimp, 7 of my bottles either broke or cracked. Not good. The bottles where not used for homebrewing before and were not screw tops. I went to a homebrew store not too far from me (I hadn't been there before since I just moved) and showed the gentleman my capper. He didn't like the looks of the one I had and I left with a better winged capper. The new capper was definitely an improvement, but I still struggled with lots of slipping. I did eventually re-crimp all of the bottles.
I went online and found that this is not an uncommon problem for newbies, but I didn't find a lot for an explanation as to why this happens. I think I know what the problem is: many of my bottles have small collars (is that what you call them?). Several of my bottles are from Samuel Adams and are your typical skinny bottles with a 1/2" (I'm eyeballing this) collar. The majority of my bottles are the shorter squatter kind with about 1/4" collar (http://www.gearybrewing.com/). My thinking is the collars on the shorter bottles are too small for my capper to get a good grip and thus causes the slipping and incomplete capping.
So... what do you all think? Am I on to something here?
I went online and found that this is not an uncommon problem for newbies, but I didn't find a lot for an explanation as to why this happens. I think I know what the problem is: many of my bottles have small collars (is that what you call them?). Several of my bottles are from Samuel Adams and are your typical skinny bottles with a 1/2" (I'm eyeballing this) collar. The majority of my bottles are the shorter squatter kind with about 1/4" collar (http://www.gearybrewing.com/). My thinking is the collars on the shorter bottles are too small for my capper to get a good grip and thus causes the slipping and incomplete capping.
So... what do you all think? Am I on to something here?
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