You’ve made a gallon, maybe a couple, of your favorite homebrew. Now what? How do you store your brew for long term storage, whether to age or simply to last for a long time? You may wonder how to bottle homebrew yourself?
What supplies do you need to easily bottle your brew? Your supplies may depend on if you want to cap or cork your bottles, or use a re-usable swing-top bottle. You’ll need caps or corks, a capper or corker, or, just a few swing top bottles.
Here’s what we recommend for basic bottling supplies.
Capping Bottles
Typically, when you bottle beer, you’ll want to cap your bottles similar to commercially sold bottled beer. Most commercial beer bottles are 12 ounces. For a one gallon batch of beer, you’ll get just over 10 bottles, while a seven gallon batch will need over 70!
To be frugal, we actually save our commercial beer bottles after we drink them, remove the labels, and wash and sanitize them.
Before you start, make sure that you have enough bottles, washed and sanitized (see our previous post about recommended sanitizers), as well as extra caps, also washed and sanitized. Use a bottle filler to use fill each beer bottle.
Place a cap on each bottle and use a capper to crimp the cap snugly to the bottle.
Corking Bottles
Usually, wine or mead is corked in a bottle for longer storage life. Corking a bottle results in a professional looking homebrew. You can even design a label, print it on regular paper, and glue it to your bottle with a glue stick!
To cork a bottle, use a similar process to capping beer described above. Make sure you have enough wine bottles for the volume you brewed. Normal wine bottles are about 750 ml in size, so you may get about 5 bottles out of a one gallon batch of homebrew, depending on the amount of sediment you leave behind in the fermenter.
Fill you bottles with a bottle filler carefully, trying not to aerate the liquid. When oxygen is introduced to the bottle, the wine or mead may develop off flavors as it ages.
Steam and sanitize your corks in a pot of hot water, removing them carefully and placing in the corker. Use the corker to compress the cork into the wine bottle.
Swing Top Bottles
Regardless of your brew, swing top bottles are the easiest to use and are reusable! While they may not have as good of a seal as a capped or corked bottle, if you plan to consume your brew quickly then these bottles are perfect.
Hopefully, this helps you decide which method is best for you!