On my lunch today I had the pleasure of watching Dr. Horribles’ Sing-along Blog and bottling 5 gallons of Amber Ale. Sad thing is that I had to break out the 12oz bottles and other misc bottles rather than the glory that is my 22oz bottles. It now reminds me why I love bottling in craft bottles. It takes excessively longer to bottle in smaller bottles and a lot more caps. Coincidentally I also discovered why my capper was having problems. It is partially the nature of these oxy seal Caps I purchased. They are suppose to help seal over long times but they are a bit tougher when capping and you need to find that sweet spot between hard capping and softly capping. Long story short I finished up and thank God. Now I have some beer to anticipate.
Now to jump back in time a little bit and talk about Jet-dry. I use those little nuggets of dishwasher soap and Jet-dry (The lazy man’s estimates). They are great on dishes for just popping one into the dishwasher and BOOM finished product is good. Jet dry however has a fatal flaw… it coats your bottles to give it that sheen you like so much, but it will also cause head retention to drop in your homebrews. My solution is to hot clean them in the dishwasher without the soap and Starsan the shit outta em. A lot of brewers like to use some oxy-clean on their bottles and do it by hand and then sanitize right before bottling. I think it’s a preference as long as you clean em up and make sure they are sanitized right before bottling. I fill my sink with Starsan solution after cleaning my bottling bucket. It’s a assembly line situation that works well. It’s all about what works well in the end of things.
Happy Brewing!
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