Bottling in PET bottles?

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waskelton4

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Hey group..
I"m thinking back to my Mr. Beer days when he (mr beer) recommended bottling in pet type soda bottles. you know.. the two and three litre types that coke and other sodas come in.

I have about 6 16oz grolsch bottles and 1 larger (1.75ltr) grolsch bottle that i plan on using but i don't think i'm going to have collected enough standard pry off bottles by bottling time to get the job done...

would it be a horrible thing to go ahead and bottle the remainder of my brew into those soda bottles until my glass bottle stash grows.. or until i can get a keg system?

thanks
ws
 
No - it wouldn't be a terrible thing.

Keep the bottles in the dark, make sure the screw lids are on real tight and don't plan on aging the batch for looooong time in the the bottles - they are apparently slightly O2 permeable.

80/-
 
20 oz soda bottles are best, you can pour them in one go. When pouring from a larger bottle the sediment can become disturbed. They are easy to find, easy to use and are a great short to medium term solution. If you only make beers that mature quickly, its hardly worth bothering with glass. They are easy to store and light too...go for it :)
 
Years ago I used a BUNCH of them for making root beer and they turned out OK. For the time being, they oughtta be OK.
 
yup, you should be ok with them, but you can probably score plenty of free glass bottles by politely asking around at local pubs/bars/etc. (provided they sell something other than twist-off brands)

-walker
 
there is a brewery in Canada that actually dispenses it's beer in 2 litre pet bottles.

when we have our club meetings - some of the folk bring 2 litre pet bottles pressurized.

so no I'd say do it - just keep them out of the light and you should be fine
 
Me an' my posse are 100% PET up here pretty much and they work great. We buy the pint-sized ones from our HBSs and haven't had any problems, in fact they are easy and you always get a positive seal. Another advantage is that you'll never get a bottle granade and you can squeeze them to see how the carbonation is coming along, although I expect I would sqeeze glass bottles too ;)
We haven't aged any for more than six months in them and are starting to do some experimentation with them vs. glass for long term storage. We'll post the results.
 
Is Mylar the same as PET? Not sure... but the bottles you buy from the HBS are mylar... anyhow... yeast being an oxygen scavenger, you should be okay for a long time in plastic. Clear bottles are light sensitive, glass or plastic. I've never really seen a difference between plastic bottled beer and grolsch bottled beer. The caps are cheap, and the plastic bottles aren't as slippery if you use the pink powder to sanitize.
 
Mylar is actually Biaxially Oriented PET which supposedly has better gas-blocking properties than plain old PET. There are all sorts of different treatments for PET to make it less permeable. Now the big question: What do the HB bottles have that the pop bottles may not?
 
Chairman Cheyco said:
Now the big question: What do the HB bottles have that the pop bottles may not?

Probably only about an extra 50c per bottle
 
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