Mead - what type of bottles
Mead - what type of bottles
Hey all, I have brewed a few meads in the past. I have used capped beer bottles, I have used wine bottles & corks for still mead, and I have most recently used swingtop (flip top, Grolsch-style bottles). All of those seemed to work fine. Do you all have preferences or experiences where one type of bottling works better for you?
Only proper wine corks are good for proper mead. I mean, yeah, there is place in our life for fermented honey solution that is consumed fast, but proper mead should age like expensive wine. It's more noble than wine, after all!
Bottling mead thus is always a challenge. I've tried all kinds of methods, or course beer caps - and especially swingtops - just start leaking at best in few years. Compouns corks too, and, being low grade stuff, they are often stinky themselves. The only exception are belge bottles and fat compound corks for braggots, if corked belge way, they occasionally leak some liquid at first, but then seal themselves for good.
Even higher grade corks tend to degrade over the years. Highest grade does not degrade. I've just negotiated a sample of fancy corks from Portugal, about 1eur/cork, highest grade. They look really good and will probably work, but min order is 6000 and they have to be repackaged sterile. Good thung I have sterile line, but 6000? It's 10x more than all bottles I have now! I could place them in my webstore in small bags? Would someone be buying them?
I was looking into alternatives, but nothing so far looks promising. I'm thinking about turning other wood types on a lathe, but that will probably result in a disaster.
Just curious about the corking process. Only from hearsay I know cork had to be steamed before use. Is that the case and, if so, why the need for sterility when repackaging the stoppers? They can just be sterilized via steaming pre-use.
Steamings damage corks, especially sterilizing ones. Their number should be minimized. Now for bottling, I do not think it is important for corks to be sterile, as anything worth of corking will kill whatever might be living on cork surface. Sanitized is enough.
Now repackaging is another beast. Once packaged, corks are left for indefinite time, and if inoculated with something that might survive on bare cork (pretty much this means fungi), it might become a nice growth media. Then, steaming might kill it (and if it is not pressurized, that would not kill spores), but it will not clean it from the cork.
So, on small scale, it is not very important, some corks might get spoiled occasionally. But 6000 is no small scale lol.
I like bottles that don't need special tools to close. So swingtop or even pet (if it is something I will drink soon).
Just to add I don't brew mead I want to try it sometime but didn't hot to it yet.