Bottles from bars?
We have a couple neighborhood bars, and I'm in need of bottles, so I was thinking about approaching the owners to see if they'd save bottles for me.
How does one clean these bottles? I'm a bit of a neat freak, and I've seen what people put in their empty bottles at bars. I figure I'll thow anything with non-beer contents into the recycling bin, but what is the best way to handle the rest? I want to sterilize them, not just sanitize. How to breweries that deal with returns handle this?
I used to just ask guys at work for their beer bottles. I was given over 100.
The method I used was to put a few tbsp of Straight A (or equivalent cleaner) into a 5 gallon bucket of water and let them sit for several minutes. Take a bottle brush and clean the inside. Repeat if necessary. After that, I had a bucket with 1 oz of Star San and 5 gallons water, I would then let the bottles sit in there for another few minutes. Let them dry afterwards.
Some bottles needed to be cleaned a few times, but most didn't.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, you do NOT need to sterilize. Commercial breweries don't. This is an unnecessary step. Unless you are performing surgery, it is overkill. Straight A along with Star San does an excellent job cleaning. If you absolutely insist on it, put them in the dishwater.
Breweries don't deal with returned bottles. I don't know a whole lot about it, but at least in my state, glass bottles are broken down, sent to recycling plants, who I believe crush and melt them, then form new bottles. Someone told me that, so I'm not totally positive. But the nasty returned bottles don't go straight to the brewery.
Wow... I googled for the recycled bottles and found this... looks like I was right:
http://www.consrv.ca.gov/DOR/rre/kids/whrg.htm
I'm just a paranoid person 
with no dishwasher. I work at home, and most of hubby's co-workers don't drink. No one I know drinks, so the best way for me to get a number of bottles quickly is either buy 'em or get 'em from the bar. I'm going for economy!
Nobody you know drinks and nobody he works with does either? Wow... I don't think I have ever (well, since 21) worked at a place where *nobody* besides me drinks. Interesting.
I used to get bottles from coworkers with cigarette butts and all kinds of crap in them. Some of them I cleaned a few times, others I threw away if I couldn't get everything out. I still didn't sterilize.
But if you insist, here is a detailed page I found with some information you might find useful:
http://brewingtechniques.com/library/ba … aines.html
About the middle of the page discussed sterilization.
cubx wrote:
Nobody you know drinks and nobody he works with does either? Wow... I don't think I have ever (well, since 21) worked at a place where *nobody* besides me drinks. Interesting.
I didn't say *nobody* at his place of work drinks. I said MOST don't drink... although it's not really relevant to the question
Yes, we have a very small social circle, and we are the only ones who drink alcohol. I have no worries about friends drinking all my beer.
And that website is AWESOME!! Thanks for posting it.
Well, ok sorry, I interpreted "most" as basically none. Actually, to me that IS relevant because if he worked with people who drink, he could get beer bottles from them, vice you getting them from a bar.
But either way, as long as you have your source picked out, that's all good.
You might also check with your homebrew shop. My old shop used to get bottles from customers and would sell used cases of them for like $5.
Something I forgot to mention Maria... if you are unable to get bottles from a bar, or what have you, I would recommend buying 22 oz bottles from a homebrew shop. I don't recall the price, I know the 12 oz used to be $9 a 12 pack though. Anyway, bottling sucks to bad that I wish I would have bought those instead, but I keg now.
I was never able to fill 50+ 12 oz bottles in less than 3 hours. So if you have to resort to buying them, look into the 22 oz. The bottle cap should be the same.
I agree, bottling SUCKS. Hubby's all for making a kegerator but wants to see what homebrew tastes like first before committing to the expense and space (can't say as I blame him.) After bottling my first batch, I'm ready to start kegging TOMORROW.
If I use larger bottles, will the amount of priming sugar change? I've read that one uses less priming sugar in kegs, so I'm assuming the amount of sugar needed is in some way inversely proportional to the size of the container, at least to a degree.
I only had 12 oz bottles, but I always put 3/4 cup corn sugar into the bottling bucket, stirring it up, then bottled. I don't see why more than 3/4 cup would be necessary, regardless of bottle size.
As for priming a keg, never done it. Ever since my first kegging, I just siphon beer into it, crank up the co2 to about 30 psi, roll it around on the floor for 15 minutes (or longer), and tap it. In my mind, priming it is unnecessary because you are force carbonating.
I once read that after you switch to kegging, you will never bottle again. I agree.
Maria,
I regard to picking up bottles from other sources than your local homebrew store, consider that most commercial bottles are intended for one use and then dispose. The main difference is the thickness of the glass. Stay away from twist off tops all together. The glass is really thin and besides, your caps will not seat well and you'll be wasting good beer.
I have found that Sundance Amber Ale bottles work well for homebrewing as well as Dead Horse bottles from Moab brewery. (Besides, why not get some good tasting beer out of the deal if you're gonna buy bottles anyway) 
I live in Michigan and our bottles are 10 cent returnables. I went to my local liquor store and buy their returned bottles for 10 cents. That saves me about 30 cents per bottle on buying a case from my LHBS. I also justify buying myself better beer because I can use the bottles over again. I have been switching to 22 oz. bottles which are 60 cents per bottle in a case. That means the 22 oz. Sam Adams Boston Lager costs me about $1.79 with deposit included because I take the 60 cents off for what having the bottle saves me. Yeah, mental gymnastics trying to justify drinking what I want to drink, but it makes me feel better. I really like those bottles because after you soak them for about 10 minutes the label slides right off and I have to bottle less bottles per batch.
We don't have glass deposits here. I checked with the local bar, they said I was more than welcome to dumpster dive but they wouldn't set any bottles aside. I even offered to meet the cleaning crew when they dumped the trash, but apparantly they toss the bottles in with the general trash. I don't particularly feel like sifting through bags of soggy garbage, so I may end up just buying 22 oz bottles from the LHBS.
Most states don't have a bottle bill. People just throw them away. I wouldn't dumpster dive either. I definitely recommend 22 oz bottles. They probably cost a little more, but you can reuse them, and that will just about cut your bottling time in half until you start kegging.
I would just buy a few 12pks or cases of beer, Sam Adams or anything with the right type of bottle, and enjoy emptying them with some friends, If you going to buy bottles at $9 a 12pk or so you might as well pay a few bucks more and get them with beer in them.
MariaAZ,
I live in Canada and a good number of empties make their way back into the brewery production line. Just before NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) came to Canada, the industries looked long and hard at ways to become more competitive. Before NAFTA, legislation required that beer had to be produced in the province it was to be sold, partyy as a way of ensuring that breweries were spread around the country. In a country as large as Canada, that made a certain amount of sense.
Since that time, most of the larger Canadian breweries have standardized to one type of long neck bottle (called a T-bottle). This bottle is used by Molson's, Labatt's, Big Rock, etc and this means that local bottle returns allow a very large number of bottles to be reused in manufacturing by any domestic breweries. Sorry for being so longwinded, but without this bottle standardization I doubt it would have been feasible to do so. These T-bottles are twist offs and no damn good for homebrewing, unfortunately.
I worked at a brewing factory and the above described bottles were loaded to an assembly line in all their most disgusting glory. Cigarette butts, ashes, "oysters", and any gross stuff remained in the bottle. A huge machine called a soaker had a special contraption that inverted the bottles and placed them into a special moving tray that ran the entire length of the soaker. The bottles were continuously injected with hot water and liquic caustic by numerous nozzles, kind like ones at your local carwash. Towards the end of the soaker the machine focused on simple rinsing. The whole set-up was amazing and anything that failed to be cleaned after this process was kicked off the assembly line by a special scanning machine. Dirty bottles would be crushed and sent to recycling (anything that didn't get clean after one pass through the soaker wasn't going to ever be clean anyways). The bottles coming out of the soaker and passing the screening machine were sterile and mere seconds away from the filling and capping machines. The whole process was pretty amazing.
At home, I soak my grubbies in the sink and use a bottle brush to scrub any gunk from the bottles. I add some dish soap to help matters and then rinse them until there is no visible traces of soap. This is a "pre-clean." On bottling day, the same bottles run through my dishwasher. The dishwasher has no regular dishes. Just the bottles needed for that day. I run the dishwasher and do not use any dishwasher detergent but do add about 1/2 cup liquid bleach. I time the washing cycle so that the bottles have just completed the hot drying cycle when I bottle. This process comes pretty close to copying the process I witnessed in the brewery I used to work at. My favorite bottles are the Red Stripe stubby bottle because I can fit a batch of 60 through my dishwasher in one go.
I hadn't realized how uncommon reusing the bottles seems to be. Some of them go in the trash! That's awful. My brewery manager said that the average glass bottle managed to be reused 14 times and that it was more cost-effective and ecologically friendly than crushing and reforming the bottles. He claimed that it was even cheaper than aluminum cans even through the weight of glass has implications for transport and so forth. I'd be curious to know if the economics have changed much since that time. It goes without saying that crushing bottles makes sense for any non-domestic bottles.
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