DIY 6-Pack Bottle Filler

[YakAttack]

I've searched the DIY forum and also the bottling forum and I'm not having a lot of luck. I'm looking for a DIY simple, cheap, easy to build (meaning no welding, sweating copper, or off the wall fittings not readily found at Home Depot), CONSISTENT, gravity fed six pack filler for bottle conditioned beer.

I mean, I'm not finding anything at all. I find links to thousands of dollar machines and links to pressurized rigs (I assume for force carbonated bottling???) that still only do one bottle at a time. Nothing really multi-bottle.

I mean, we all know capping is easy. You can cap a case of beer in two minutes. Filling that case one bottle at a time is much slower and boring. It's not the end of the world, but if you have more than one brew, 4 cases is a pita.

Any ideas or links or a direction you can point me in?


When I say consistent I mean all bottles routinely fill evenly. Not two bottles overflowing for 3 seconds while two others top off.

 

[Malted_hops]

http://byo.com/american-amber-pale-ale/item/375-build-a-multiple-bottle-filler-projects

Maybe this could be modified to fill 6 at a time.

 

[YakAttack]

The issue with this rig, I think, would be that as you add more bottles the ones closer to the center of the manifold would fill faster than the ones farther out on the ends. Especially if you divide it to do a six pack. You'd have to find a way to slightly restrict the flow to the center bottles, maybe a clothes pin on the tubing or something, but now you're getting so imprecise and touchy that you're going to have issues if one clothes pin pinches harder than the others.

 

[MrFoodScientist]

You're asking for a lot of things all at once.
-Gravity Fed
-Consistent
-DIY with readily available parts
-Easy to build
-Cheap

I'm thinking you're going to need to pare down your wishlist a bit before you find anything like this.

If I were going to do this, I'd try something along these lines.
Somehow you'll need to get a pipe full of beverage above, then equal length lines coming from each of the six ports below, attached to bottle fillers that are as equally spaced as possible. Keeping the lines as equal as possible in terms of length, kinks, and angle will even out the flow so that all the bottles fill consistently. Even still you'll likely have one or two that will fill a little faster than the others.

There's at least an idea for two out of the five things on your list, gravity fed, and hopefully consistent.

 

[IslandLizard]

It would be simpler to have each of the fill tubes shut off when a certain preset level is reached.

 

[billl]

A 4 pack filler would me much simpler. Build he head like an H and feed from the center. That way, each outlet would be the same distance from the feed and the bottles would all fill at the same rate. If you don't know how to use copper pipe, you could make it out of PVC but you might have more issues with foaming.

 

[YakAttack]

Those fittings are crazy. I've been in the plumbing supply business for over ten years and have never seen them.

So this is what I have so far. The obvious problem is flow rate at the outer tubes. 1 to 6 is just too hard to overcome without pressure. So if I start from the beginning and just go from 1 to 2, that's pretty easy. You just use a tee and 2 elbows, make sure your tubing on each side is equal length and you should have equal flow rate. Agreed?

Somewhere in here I found a post that had a pic of a bottling bucket with 3 spigots in it, it was over a dish washer I think. That got me thinking, what if you do 1 to 2 three times? If all the tubing lengths are again the same you should get equal flow rate out of them all. Then it's just a matter of building a jig that positions all six tubes properly so you can insert them simultaneously into a six pack of bottles. Basically three separate two port manifolds all in a row, with three hoses running to three spigots.

From what I've kind drawn up so far, you'd need some vinyl tubing, 3 pex tees, 6 pex elbows, three bottling bucket spigots, a bottling bucket, and 6 fill tubes. That doesn't seem hard to get or expensive...... if it works.

 

[YakAttack]

You know what, I talked myself into it. I'm going to stop at Love2Brew and get fill tubes and give it a shot.

 

[YakAttack]

Here's what I've put together so far.

 

[YakAttack]

getting there

 

[mattd2]

Have you thought about looking at it from a different angle - not trying to fill all the bottles at the same time to the same hieght. But starting to fill 1 bottle, then the second.... then the 6th, then go back and remove the first and reload. I'll try find the post on probrewer for a setup like this.
Here is the link that are bottling from a keg but if you raise the bucket up higher you should get a decent flow down into the fillers

 

[mrdauber64]

I'm intersted to see how this turns out. Subscribed!

 

[the_ginger_ninja]

There is another option!

Hopefully the photos will work. No DIY required to put it together other than attaching a hose with a hose-clip. I must have bottled 40,000 bottles using one of these. And they're pretty darned cheap.

The height of the inlet is adjustable as you can see on the photo, and is simply adjusted by undoing a wing-nut.

The inlet also has an auto-stop in the form of a ball valve. Adjusting the height of the inlet/ball-valve raises/lowers the height of the liquid in the filler which adjusts the height to which the bottles are filled. Simples.

Simply start the flow on each filling head by using a little suction, then hang the bottles on the rail. The rail height can also be adjusted to raise/lower the fill height in the bottle.

Springs under the filling heads are used to stop the filling heads from flowing when there's no bottle present. If you find that your bottle is too light, simply adjust the springs using the wing-nuts and it will release the pressure.

Inner bowl is plastic, filling heads are stainless. Easy to clean,simple to operate.

You can bottle three at a time, and it's really consistent on the fill level. I mean really consistent!

I don't know why you need to fill them actually in the 6 pack other than for speed/fill levels - and this will do both marvelously anyway.

If you want to know more, or want some then let me know.

 

[YakAttack]

Being that I've only been messing with this for two nights the results are very promising.

 

[YakAttack]

A few things I've noticed so far.

Right off the bat the tubing is stiff as hell. It's almost like using pex. I was thinking about running it thru the dishwasher or something. It's a bit of an issue though. It makes using it a little awkward. When you lift the manifold part the tubing pushes the bucket around like you're pushing it with a stick. Maybe it just needs to break in.

I used 1/4 turn plumbing valves for my spigots. I might be better off using the traditional bottling bucket spigot that's on most buckets. I realized I'm going to need to get this puppy apart to clean it, and this tubing is on TIGHT. The fancy chrome is cute, but for actual use I think I might re-engineer this using those red spigots. I also built this using a food grade bucket from Lowes. I'll use a taller actual bottling bucket on the next go around.

You definitely want the spring loaded fill tubes. There isn't a lot of room to work getting the tubes into the bottle. When you drill out the block to hold the tubes it needs to be EXACT and even then, you need the spring loaded tubes for the tension. With the black gravity tips you just start pouring all over the place as soon as you touch the jig to the bottle tops. Everything needs to be perfectly straight and lined up for this to work. If it takes you 5 minutes to get the jig into the bottles its not worth it. Also, the white crap you see is silicone. I used it as like a non-permanent glue sort of, just to hold stuff in place. When I get it all worked out I'll make it permanent. If one of the tubes moves it's useless.

I think I might rebuild the 1 into 2 parts of the manifold. Right now I'm using a pex tee and a pex elbow and since they are both pex ends I'm using tubing as a coupling between them, I might try to eliminate that connection there and sweat that section together.

All in all in my test runs I was excited by the results. I had 4 bottles fill perfectly and 2 come up to about 80% of where I'd want them to be.

I was also thinking about taking a piece of plywood about the size of the bottom of a case of beer and drilling out countersunk holes into it so as I take bottles off the tree I can set them into this, which would hold them exactly where they'd be in a case. So instead of dealing with six packs, I'd just do this thing 1/4 at a time. If that makes any sense. One reason is that six packs aren't solid, so if it gets a little cattywompus on you again, the tubes aren't going to line up.

Basically, I'm happy with the design and there is huge potential I think, I just need to start taking the play out of it in some places and tightening everything up. I'll try to get a video of it in action once I fine tune it a little bit more.

 

[YakAttack]

And again, this is built using pex elbows, pex tees, vinyl tubing, shut off valves, and a 2x4. Everything came from Lowes so far except for the fill tubes. Nothing was welded, no copped sweat, only 3 holes need to be drilled and only vinyl tubing needs to be cut. So far anyway.

I forgot about the block of wood. You need to cut a block of wood and drill the holes in that too. I'm still on target though.

 

[the_ginger_ninja]

Just a quick thought:

Be very careful when using copper/bronze piping with product. If whatever you're filling is acidic then it will strip copper from the pipe fillings and can give copper poisoning.

Bottling what I make (lemonades etc.) this is a very serious problem - we don't use copper anywhere as it's not a small, insignificant risk - it will happen, the only question is how much/how fast.

I love what you're doing though!

 

[YakAttack]

Only the elbows are copper, the tees are brass. When I finalize everything I'll leave the copper out and either go all brass or I also have poly pex fittings I can use. I think I even have some ABS pex fittings kicking around too. In any case, it's very easy to drop the copper from the equation. Thanks for the heads up.

On a side note, what about the dozen or so copper coils I drop in my beer in the form of a wort chiller???

 

[YakAttack]

And just working off this idea and principal you could always spin off it. Maybe just do two spigots with twin fillers, so you're filling two at a time in each hand or just build one '1 into 2' type manifold and fill two bottles at a time. That would cost like $4 to build and cut your fill time in half.

 

[Stealthcruiser]

Copper is no problem in "wort" , only in "beer", as I understand it.

 

[YakAttack]

Ok, so I'll switch to this.

 

[morticus]

Copper is no problem in "wort" , only in "beer", as I understand it.

Yes copper is a yeast nutrient.

 

[nhindian]

Ok, so I'll switch to this.

Hey, did you ever get a working prototype for this?

I'm going to be bottling a LOT of beer for my wedding, and anything I can do to expedite the process will be much appreciated!

 

[lael]

Any updates on how this worked?