Beer Bottles

I can’t tell you how much I hate to wash beer bottles. Here is what me and about 8 friends took care of last night.  Not really that much (only about 6-liters of beer), but if I didn’t wash them today, they would just sit around and accumulate until my lovely wife reminds me they need washed. : )   And, I usually let quite a few stack up until I wash as I really hate to wash bottles.  I am really looking forward to when I am back in the US and will get a keg setup.  Not that I am going to completely give up on bottles forever, but the bulk of my beer I would like to keg.

I have been using Fischer bottles now for sometime.  In fact, I drank a LOT of Fischer beer so that I could get my first set of bottles for my first batch of beer back in April 2009.  But, I’ve been getting concerned that I’m not getting the swingtops and the gaskets sanitized well.  I think this is the third or maybe four batch of beer bottled in these same bottles and I’m starting to worry that I’m not getting everything clean enough when washing bottles.  So, I recently picked up a pressure cooker to try some new meals and I thought I would try removing the swingtops from the Fischer bottles and running them in the pressure cooker to autoclave them.  My new pressure cooker is only an 80 kPa model, so it only does about 12 psi.  So, I’m thinking I’ll need about 20 minutes in there to completely sterilize them.  The photo above is the first test I ran.  Since the top is plastic and the gasket is just rubber, I was a little worried that the top would melt.  But everything turned out okay.  I still need to run a 20-minutes cycle to make sure that everything will be okay, but right now, it looks okay.  Before my next bottling session, I’ll remove all the swingtops from my Fischer bottles and sterilize them all.  I post this as some of the folks on Homebrewtalk were worried about the tops melting.  For now, I think it will be okay.  I’ll keep you posted after I run a batch for 20-minutes.