Beer Forum

All,
I’ve going nuts with my beer gun bottling a bunch of beers to get them ready for future competitions (if I don’t bottle them now, I’ll kill the kegs and have nothing to enter). Because of this, and I’m running out of space to store the bottles cold. I’ve got a few places I could store them, but it would mean laying them on their side. I use the 02 absorbing caps. I find myself wondering if anyone is aware of any potential problems that may arise from long term storage with beer in contact with the 02 caps.
This is probably a stupid question, but I felt it was worth asking.
Thanks in advance!

I don't think there's any problem with having the beer in contact with the caps, but you may be defeating the purpose of the caps by doing so. Don't they work by scavenging oxygen in the headspace? If the bottles are on their sides, the headspace is surrounded by glass, and not in contact with the caps.

I am not sure about the cap thing, but with resting on their side they will sediment out to some degree along the side of the bottle, even if the beer is filtered. Just a thought.

Mills

the caps would be fine, but i wouldn't store horizontally.

Thanks, all. It looks like I'll have to find some quality canned beers to store on that shelf.

I used to be paranoid about my O2 caps until I heard Jamil basically say, screw the O2 caps, they need to be sanitized and thats going to break the O2 absorbing qualities. It's better to store beer with no bugs than to store infected beer with O2 caps.

I sanitize my O2 caps. Also, isn't the O2 caps more for long term aging?

A recent Zymurgy talked about Sierra Nevada no longer using O2 caps because it actually negatively impacted the taste (or so they thought) of their beers. Charles Bamforth has also said in the past that a lot of beers are oxygenated to some extent in their life cycle and that that minor oxygenated off flavor is something our palletes grow to expect in beer (to a very small degree, obviously this taste to a greater extent is a bad thing). My point is, don't worry so much about O2 caps. A homebrew with live yeast in it will probably scavenge most of the O2 anyway.

RDWHAHB

and the fact that crown caps don't seal perfectly forever either...