Bottles!

Shitty Italian soda, apparently.

I am a huge fan of glass bottles, flip top Grolsch style ones to be specific. I shopped around a little, and as suspected they are quite expensive to buy new. Pisser. .......so I hit up the local classifieds.

I found a guy who knew a guy (Great start to a story, I know) who worked in a local grocery store warehouse. They brought in some high end Italian soda that sold for $7 a bottle ............needless to say they didn't sell any of it, and the warehouse was jammed with loads of unsold expired expensive bottles of Italian soda, in beautiful 750ml glass flip top bottles. Bingo.


For comedy, here is almost 3 minutes of internet gold: Some dude doing an online review of the stuff. Oh, how I laugh at this lame crap.

Focus. My guy talked his boss into letting him have all of the expired stock, dumped it all out, and posted the bottles online for $1.25 each. I haggled like hell with him but he wouldn't budge - but for $15 for a dozen? I bought 4 cases. Not a bad deal.

Taped up box.

He offered to clean them up for more money, but this is something that I could easily manage on my own. I soaked them all in warm water and the glued on labels floated off with out issue. Awesome.

From helping my Pop bottle beer as a kid, I remember that some of his bottle boxes got wet and fell apart - making transporting beer around in bulk a royal pain the ass. To get around that, he used packing tape on his remaining boxes to give them a level of protection against getting soggy. Not a bad idea, and it worked quite well. So I taped up the bottoms of my boxes and used duct tape to reinforce the tops, that were sold to me slightly split.

So here's my math: one batch of beer is in or around 5 gallons of beer, or 18927.1 mL. Divided by my 750 mL bottles, one batch of beer will fill just over 25 of my new bottles, or just over 2 boxes. Nice. So I should be able to have 2 kinds of beer happening at any given time, rotating through my 4 cases of bottles.

NOTE: I don't want to hear any 'should use brown/green bottles' smack from anyone, it's a non issue for me. All bracieRSS beer will be made and stored in my basement/beer fridge, no where near a window (i.e. near sunlight, the bane of beer in clear bottles) and will be consumed promptly when ready. I have no intention of keeping it around or ageing it at all, so any potential to spoil based on light, is non existent.

ALSO: I've read that not all glass bottles are equal. As beer is carbonated, I need to ensure that re-purposed bottles are capable of holding in the pressure of a carbonated beverage. As these were pop bottles, I'm going to go ahead and not worry about it.

Onward.