homemade bottle tree

[jldc]

I am making a bottle tree out of wood this weekend, my step dad had a full blown wood shop in his basement.

we are just going to use dowels and turn a 4x4 on the lathe to make it round
going to make it hold 40 of my 500mL bottles

I think the risk of bacteria hiding in porous wood is overstated. I clipped the following from a website for wooden cutting boards, but I've read similar comments elsewhere:

The myth is that wooden boards are so porous that harmful organisms such as salmonella, e-coli and listeria soak in, are hard to remove, and easily contaminate other foods placed upon it later.

The myth has been compounded with the belief that plastic, because it is not porous, can be more easily and safely cleaned. These beliefs were so widely held by everyone including health officials that no one actually bothered to test them until 1993. Microbiologists at the University of Wisconsin's Food Research Institute contaminated wooden cutting boards and plastic ones with all bacteria that cause food poisoning.... Guess what?

Without washing, without touching it, the bacteria on the wooden board died off in three minutes. On the plastic board? The bacteria remained and actually multiplied overnight. It seems wood has a natural bacteria-killing property, plastic and glass don't."

 

[KDM]

Howdy -- noob here, haven't yet brewed. One of the reasons I want to is so I can learn more about (how) my ancestors (managed). I'm talking about German immigrant farm folks in Texas from roughly 1850 to 1950. All my own fifty years I've heard my father tell tales of home brewed beer, wine, and root beer. I could go on, but I believe I've set up my question...

There were no plastic bottle trees back in those days. How'd the rural folks do it?

 

[tndave]

In fact, shellac is the same material that's put onto the shells of M&Ms to make em shiny. It comes from the lac beetle.
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