I was looking on Amazon and they have 12 ounce PET bottles with resealable caps. Is plastic Ok? No broken glass. I should be ready to bottle in 2.5 weeks, guessing.
Oooh - that's a homebrewer question, but I'm inclined to say no - I have never had beer out of a plastic bottle - homebrew or not - but you can ask in the homebrew section to be sure. Welcome to the site - cheers
Howdy and welcome. Since I have never bottled anything I wouldn't know but my gut says stick with glass.
Welcome to the BA site, davep105. Since you must be a homebrewer, I'll also suggest that you ask the question in the Homebrewing forum. I spend a lot of time there myself and I can't recall that question ever being discussed, so it would be a good topic to bring up for discussion. I think plastic bottles are standard equipment with the Mr. Beer kits, so some people do use them. My two cents on the topic would be that the plastic would begin to scratch on the inside from using a bottle brush over time, and those little scratches will harbor little bugs that can infect your beer. Glass is breakable, but not very scratchable. Also, I don't know whether the caps are considered to be reusable on them or not, so some investigation would have to be done on that issue. Head on over to the Homebrewing forum and check it out. All kinds of good discussions occur there, so it is a great learning experience. Hang around as long as you'd like, and enjoy your time on the site.
I was looking on Amazon and they have 12 ounce PET bottles with resealable caps. Is plastic Ok? No broken glass. I should be ready to bottle in 2.5 weeks, guessing. Any experience using plastic? If I go with glass anyone have suggestions on who has the best deal. Almost all the glass bottles around where I live don't have crimp on lips.
What do you mean the bottles don't have crimps on the lips? I'm not sure I've ever seen a pry-off bottle that didn't resemble this, aside from long neck vs. stubby etc.: edit: In PA you can get Bells, Lagunitas, and Sierra Nevada. All of these have labels that come off easily in a hot water and oxyclean soak. If you can't get through enough beer in 2.5 weeks, your local homebrew shop would also carry bottles.
A lot of the ones that are pry off, the lip is actually spiraled downward. Maybe for cost effiency dual use, crimp on or twist off. I was told not to use those for homebrew, just the single lip on top. Didn't try Sierra Nevada, I'll get some.
I use plastic bottles all the time with no difference between them and the glass bottles. I use Coke style plastic bottles with twist off caps. Even when I bottle in glass I always have 1-2 in plastic, they are my test bottles to see how the carbonation is coming along. They can handle crazy CO2 levels too, so I use them when bottling brett beers.
Definitely avoid twist-off caps, most cappers don't get a good seal with them. Every time I've tried to use one, I've gotten flat (or mostly flat) beer. Plastic bottles should be fine, but avoid scrubbing them with any kind of brush that could scratch the insides. It's really hard to sanitize scratched plastic.
I've never seen a crimp cap on a twisty bottle. It sounds like a terrible idea. What breweries are doing that?
Plastic PET bottles are very much OK for packaging home brew; just don't use a stiff bottle brush to clean them (they'll get scratched). ► PETs are re-usable for-evah. Some of mine are almost 10 years old. ► The caps are re-usable but not for-evah. Mine started to fail after about five years. Replacement cost ~10¢ each. ► PETs make it easy to tell when the bottle is carbonated fully b/c they get rock hard. ► PETs sizes appropriate for home brewing come in 12 oz ... 500 mL ... and 1-L.
tried it once and will not again. Go to bottle redemption, center ask for glolsh flip top bottles , buy them, clean and buy new gaskets, good for 1 or more years depending on how often you brew. When gaskets are cracked, even a little, replace gasket.
Every brewery that uses "twist off" crowns crimps them on the bottles with the special threaded lips, the same process as used for pry-off bottles. The bottle manufacturers differentiate the two bottle "lip" designs as finishes i.e., "Crown (pry) finish" or "Crown Threaded Finish" (Ardagh Group) or simply "Crown" v. "Crown Threaded". (O-I's images below). The ability for a brewery to use the same crowner for the "twist-offs" as for "pry offs" is why it became the near universal "no opener needed" bottle design in the US. The crowns are not "screwed on" the bottles the way a jar lid is - as can be seen simply by looking at an unused "twist off" crown which is identical in shape to a standard unused "pry off" crown. Like this old unused Fitger's "twist off" crown - same "flare" as an unused pry-off. The major difference between the crowns, pry-off v twist-off, is that the latter are made of a more malleable metal, better to form a more airtight seal around the glass "threads".
