senorfartman
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- Joined
- Dec 17, 2007
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Well I went to bottle my chocolate porter today and I've come to realize I can't stand the bottling method that 99% of us use. I use the standard ale pale with the tube spigot. It takes forever, it's messy and there's no way to consistently get the same amount of brew per bottle. After the spigot slid off for the 4th time and dumped beer all over myself and the floor, I realized I needed to do something.
Now I realize kegging is a very viable option but I just prefer beer in bottles. With all the innovation with homebrewers using off the shelf parts to brew beers, the area of bottling seems neglected.
So that got me to thinking, has anyone done any work toward DIY bottling and capping devices on the homebrew scale? Like a mini assembly line?
Solving the issue of volume consistency should be easy enough. Devise some sort of hopper with individual channels (think a couple funnels in a line) which would hold the beer above the bottles and have a valve under each channel. Open them all at once and the same volume should be distributed to each.
Devise some sort of system to automatically place caps on each brew.
Roll the beers after they are filled down the line to the capper. This is where I think we could have 100+ viable ideas. Anything from linear actuators pushing down the 2 levers of a standard capper to any multitude of others.
I'm off tomorrow so I'm sure this will be burning in my mind the whole days. I'm curious to see what you guys come up with.
Now I realize kegging is a very viable option but I just prefer beer in bottles. With all the innovation with homebrewers using off the shelf parts to brew beers, the area of bottling seems neglected.
So that got me to thinking, has anyone done any work toward DIY bottling and capping devices on the homebrew scale? Like a mini assembly line?
Solving the issue of volume consistency should be easy enough. Devise some sort of hopper with individual channels (think a couple funnels in a line) which would hold the beer above the bottles and have a valve under each channel. Open them all at once and the same volume should be distributed to each.
Devise some sort of system to automatically place caps on each brew.
Roll the beers after they are filled down the line to the capper. This is where I think we could have 100+ viable ideas. Anything from linear actuators pushing down the 2 levers of a standard capper to any multitude of others.
I'm off tomorrow so I'm sure this will be burning in my mind the whole days. I'm curious to see what you guys come up with.