Hi. This post is a bit of a spin off from a post in "Off Topic" http://thebrewingnetwork.com/forum/vie ... php?t=3108
Newer member Numbskull (Mort) is having trouble finding bottles to start brewing with. There are twist tops, but not so many pop off bottles to be had.
I had a bit of a yak about twist tops that I will repeat here, along with a bit more info.
I am quite new to decent beer and decent brewing, but I have bottled many a batch of pre-hopped, no boil, add a kilo of sugar kit beer in my time. It was really cheap; and tasted it, but it did need to go in a bottle.
Of those many batches of bad beer, the vast majority went into twist off 375ml bottles. These are pretty standard issue here in Oz and pop offs are reserved for so called premium beer, imports and craft beer.
They work, they work just fine. Even using the "whack it with mallet" style capper that I used for most of those years, I still only got a couple of bad seals here and there. Mainly I suspect because of bad mallet weilding. After I discovered the special crown seals that are made from softer metal and squish into the thread of the twist offs more effectively, even my dodgey mallet technique ceased to produce leakers.
However.... basically all the twist top bottles and probably the vast majority of pop off bottles these days are made of really thin, one time use only glass. They are designed to be used only once (by the brewery) and then crushed. So you need to be careful. I only use mine a couple of times before chucking them out and getting replacements, and if you use heat to sterilise your bottles before filling, you need to be really careful about changing the temperatures on them slowly, they heat stress really easily.
It all sounds wastefull and wrong doesn't it?? Why dont they make nice sturdy bottles and then re-fill them..???
Well thats mainly why I wanted to continue on this topic. Cause I know.
I work for a megabrewer here in Aus and I used to work on the bottling line when we did collect and refill old bottles.
For a start, you dont want to be the poor bastard who has to unstack ad de-crate those puppies. A more vile collection of cokroaches, slugs, centipedes, spiders, rats and snakes you will never see in your life; as those that hide in piles of old beer botles sitting in the local collection depot waiting for the boy scouts to bring in enough of them to fill up a truck. I used to put elastic bands around the ankles of my overalls so that none of the bastards would run up my legs. eeeew
You decrated them, weeding out and avoiding opening an artery on the smashed ones. Then all the bugs etc as well as the dirt, cigarette butts, motor oil and used condoms had to get washed out of them. So they went tthrough this gigantic bottle washer that used high temperature, high pressure and some godawful strong caustic mixture to wash the gunge out of there.... mostly
That bottle washer is one of the main reasons they dont re-use bottles anymore. In terms of sheer energy required, it actually takes less to melt down a beer bottle and recast a new one from it, than it does to wash an old one out!! Not to mention the enviromental impact of all the damn chemicals as well as the horrble amounts of water wasted (sensitive subject in Australia at the moment) and at the end, it didn't always work.
I also worked on the line after the washer. There were a series of guys whoose job it was to sit in front of white glowing glass panels, and watch bottles whizzing past. See a crack or break, whip it off the line into the bin. See it with a chunk of gunge that the washer missed or still a bit of old label stuck to it, whip it off the line and into the bin. Three of you in a row so that nothing sneaked through unnoticed, changed every 30 minutes to another job because any longer than that looking at bottles flash past a white screen; and your brain turns to porridge. And another set of 2 guys doing the same thing after the bottle filler.
But we still missed some... in the foremens office in the middle of the packaging hall, was the shelf of shame. Filled and capped, occasionally labeled as well. A row of about 30 assorted beer bottles full of nuts and bolts, rocks, icypole sticks, matches, squished bottle caps and just plain dirt. Apparently the 'complaints" department had an equally impressive collection of bottles that had been returned by customers whos silence had been bought with cases of beer (this is a rumour that I can't actually confirm) The most impressive and scary item, the one that I suspect spelled the final death knell for bottle re-filling; was a filled, capped and labelled bottle that was full to the brim with a bit of beer, but mainly with used heroin syringes. It had been spotted and snatched off the line by a passing maintenance guy, a couple of meters before going into the carton packer where the next person to see it would have been the customer
Then there were the explosions. Old bottles, maybe they've been knocked around a bit, they've certainly been heated really hot and cooled down, they might have been filled only once before, or a hundred times. Sometimes, when you fill them with high pressure beer, especially after you heat the filled bottles up to 656ish degrees C in the pasturiser, they go clink into one another just a bit too hard on the packaging line and they go bang. All a bit of fun, unless you are next to it at the time, or holding onto it. And sometimes, although I never personally saw this, the first bottle that blows up, sets the next one off, and before you know it, 10, 30 maybe 50 yards of bottling line goes off like a machine gunner has seen the ultimate opportunity for target practise. Then every bastard cops it.
So there you go. Thats some of the reasons why they dont re-fill so much anymore. Better for the brewery's budget, better for the customers, better for the environment, better for safety and most importantly.... better for me. I rarely have enourmous cockroaches drop down the back of my shirt at work these days.
Unfortunately, the only people it isn't so great for is homebrewers. But then again, the thin bottles are OK if you are a bit careful and you swap them out fairly regularly. And the twist tops work fine, just fine.
Sorry about the long post. Hope you found it a little bit informative or maybe entertaining. Consider it a bedtime story.
G'night
Thirsty
