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Sean and I are planning a saison and would like to do it right with regard to the bottling. Does anyone have saison/Unibroue/champagne bottles they could donate to the cause? Reusable wire baskets would help too. Does anyone have the right type of corker we could borrow?

K

200?! We'll have to up production seriously.

I think a regular floor corker will do the trick with a couple easy modifications. You may need to get Belgian type corks as well. NG sells the plastic ones, but I'm not sure how great they are. They may only seal a narrow range of bottle sizes. Those high pressure bottles come in various neck diameters.

mr x wrote:I think a regular floor corker will do the trick with a couple easy modifications. You may need to get Belgian type corks as well. NG sells the plastic ones, but I'm not sure how great they are. They may only seal a narrow range of bottle sizes. Those high pressure bottles come in various neck diameters.

Some floor corkers might work, but I can't see the one I have working. It (and others I've seen) compresses the cork to get it to slide into the neck - but the non-uniform width of the corks would make it difficult, if not impossible, to compress the bottom of the cork enough. Marta makes champagne, but never tried to use real corks. She used the plastic ones the first few times, but now we just use crown caps (they're a different size from regular beer caps, but Noble Grape can get them).

What you do is make a spacer so that a certain amount of the cork is left un-inserted into the bottle. Over time, this actually mushrooms out. This article shows a Colonna capper, but it also mentions that you can use a floor style wine corker with a stopper used to get the right spacing.

http://www.byo.com/stories/beer-styles/ ... g-belgians

I have a floor corker. Its design is such that the entire cork needs to pass through the part that compresses the diameter. So if the head of the cork can't fit in the neck of the bottle it won't go through my corker. Does anyone have one more like the one in the article that I could borrow?

here's how to do it with a floor corker

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/corking ... er-137529/

Good writeup.

My corker looks sort of like that but not quite. There's no way the head of the cork will pass through the bottom of the corker.

You know that the corks mushroom after they are inserted though. They look just like a wine cork (straight sides) until they are inserted into the bottle.

No I didn't know that. My only experience is taking them out. This may be doable after all.

http://novascotia.kijiji.ca/c-buy-and-s ... Z243756725

..more bottles

Did a test with the corks tonight. Floor corker does indeed work, as long as you are a little careful. Now to just brew the beer so we CAN cork it!

You just have to make sure you have a good cork soaker. Nothing beats a good cork soaker. Remember to soak the cork

I just did a trial with my el-cheapo wing type capper/corker, and it worked really well. Just use a hose clamp as a stop-nut on the plunger piston. Surprised the hell outta me.