Anyone know a source of brown "champagne" style bottles, i.e. with punted bottoms? Or if not with punted bottoms, at least rated for champagne-like CO2 levels? TIA!
I don’t know if he works directly with champagne, but @VitisVinifera is closely associated with a winery and might be able to provide some info on brown bottles that will withstand your high-pressure beer.
lots of champagne bottle mfs in California go here and enter 'glass' and 'bottle' in the search field https://wine20.mapyourshow.com/7_0/...yword&srch-query=bottle&srch-showresults=true
https://www.mdhb.com/product_info.php?cPath=21_41_42&products_id=16071 I’ve used these for some highly carbed saisons. I like that they take caps as well.
Interweb results for amber champagne bottles get more hits than brown, but not many more. The images in the first link looks identical to the pic in the link by @MightyTrustKrusher . Maybe mdhb gets theirs from the Saxco? https://www.saxco.com/750-ml-champagne-style-bottles-in-cases-29-mm-803.html MightKrusher, do those bolltes have punts? Punts are obvious in the pics of these: https://www.amazon.com/Bottles-750m...ils?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1573602435&sr=8-38 (edited for clarity)
They do indeed have punts. They also sell thick glass Belgian style bottles without punts, that I have used with beers north of 3 volumes of CO2.
So, I bought these bottles and will be using them in a couple of weeks. When you used them, did you use a wing capper? If so, did you reverse the "blades" (or whatever the term is) that hold the bottle's neck, to use the ends with the bigger openings?
Okay, so here’s what’s interesting/odd about that. The first few times I used them I did the reverse plates on the wing capper business. They crimped okay but sometimes required multiple attempts to seal in a way that I deemed acceptable. Then during another bottling day with a later batch I had an extremely hard time with them (and a few other sized Belgian bottles). I was able to cap them all but it was a fight. After that I bought a bench capper and they’ve been a breeze. It would have probably been more helpful if I had mentioned this before you purchased them, and for that I apologize. Hopefully you won’t deal with any complications.
I got the Colt Strong High Pressure Bench Bottle Capper. Once you get used to the force required to cap bottles it’s a breeze.
PSA: The 750 ml amber, punted bottles from Maryland Homebrew have a neck inner diameter that is not big enough to add Domino Dots for priming. I had to break/crush them to get them in. Thinking about this (20/20 hindsight), this is probably true of any thick walled bottle that accepts standard caps.
I'm sorry that you experienced bottling day frustration (been there, unfortunately). Were you able to rectify the situation without too much trouble?
It wasn't too bad. Jammed them through with the (sanitized) tweezers I was using to pick them up. There were definitely some sugar shards flying.
Does the Domino dots work as well as buying the priming sugar sold at my homebrew shop that I have to boil and add to the bottling bucket?
Domino dots are sucrose (aka table sugar). The priming sugar you're buying at the LHBS is glucose (aka dextrose, i.e. corn sugar). Both kinds can be used for carbonating. An advantage to the dots is that if the amount you need per bottle happens to be a whole number of dots (cubes), it's easy to get bottle to bottle consistency, which is something some people struggle with when adding sugar to a bottling bucket (due to uneven distribution). A disadvantage of adding solid sugar directly to a bottle is a slightly increased chance of contamination, though I can't recall hearing of any cases where a contamination was attributed to it. ETA: It's interesting to note that yeast use glucose directly, but when sucrose is the sugar, they first have to break it down into its components, i.e. glucose and fructose. So metabolically, corn sugar is "easier" for yeast to deal with.
