G Strong's Competiton Bottling Technique

[BigNastyBrew]

I've always wondered - how are you supposed to get the bottles cold AND keep them sanitized? Do you stick the bottles in the fridge/freezer, then give them a quick dunk in Star-San immediately before filling?

Sanitation is always important but maybe you can back off a little once you're here. The beer has alcohol in it now and the temperature is not going to be the best environment for spoilage, anyway.

[TastyMcD]

I've always wondered - how are you supposed to get the bottles cold AND keep them sanitized? Do you stick the bottles in the fridge/freezer, then give them a quick dunk in Star-San immediately before filling?

I guess you could ice-up your star-san. If I'm doing 12 bottles or less, I PBW the bottles (even if they are brand new), sanitize them, and cover each bottle with aluminum foil. When I'm doing more than 12 bottles, I line the bottom of the case box the bottles came in with paper towels, and put the cleaned and sanitized bottles back in the box upside down and seal the box. The bottles and the beer should be the SAME temperature so I think the freezer would be too cold.

Tasty

[linuxelf]

I've got a counter pressure bottle filler, and I've got a home-made ghetto filler (basically just beer tubing forced through a stopper. I use the CPBF if I'm going to hold the beer for any length of time, since it has the ability to purge O2 and my ghetto version doesn't. I use the ghetto one for filling a few bottles for a club meeting. I've never chilled my bottles. My method is, PBW overnight, blast them with a jet bottle washer, and put them in a bucket of StarSan. When I'm ready to bottle, I pull straight from the StarSan and start filling. I've never been dinged in competitions for low carbonation, and I've had bottles sitting around for over a year that still retained plenty of carbonation.

[Sent From My iPhone]

I bottled 7 different beers last weekend ala Tasty. I put a couple inches of Star San in each bottle, put them in the freezer for about 20 minutes, dumped the ice-cold Star San just prior to filling, purged with CO2, filled and capped. A sixer of 7 different beers in a little over an hour. Not sure how they'll last long-term, though. I'll still use my Beer gun when filling a lot of bottles of the same beer, but the Tasty method seems to work well for quick and nasty bottling.