Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

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Mead - what type of bottles (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago by ErrorCode@lemmy.world to c/homebrewing@sopuli.xyz

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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?

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[–] SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz 1 points 20 hours ago

TIL, thanks!

Never considered the perspective of actual things growing on/in the corks. Sort of always assumed that, being some type of wood, as long as it's stored properly (like not in a damp cellar), things growing wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the issue that remains would be transfer of spoilage microorganisms on the surface.