Surely a prise-off top is quicker for a bartender than a twist-off? They always have a wall- or bar-mounted opener, so it’s a lot quicker to pop the bottle in and flip the top off than it is to grapple with a twist-off.
Small? My roommate did it once and took off the entire neck. It took us three days to find the glass. He sliced up his hand pretty well too. And worst of all, half the beer was wasted when it shot everywhere!
. . .or bruising your hand, while removing chunk of wood from counter, while partially opening the cap, while subjecting the bottle to a tremendous jarring force, which causes beer to jet from the partial opening. . .
That’s an old, faithful method all right. . .it’ll turn your bottle into Old Faithful.
I always thought that pop-off versus twist-off didn’t make much difference, much like a cork versus a screw cap in a wine bottle.
It’s just all in the marketing.
I also think Corona is one of the worse beers going, or at least way overrated. They’ve marketed themselves as a real premium beer, and I think its quality is on par with a Budweiser, Miller, or Rolling Rock.
The greatest Mexican victory against America since the Alamo.
Yeah!
And why do some wines come with easy twist-off tops while others have tops that require some kind of mechanism to open?
This one’s mainly down to the snobbery involved with wine. Many experts will tell you that a real cork is necessary, but there’s little objective evidence. The plastic corks are a half-way house, and also mean that the bottling machinery doesn’t need to change. Screw-cap wines have always been associated with cheap rubbish, although they’re becoming more common.
Rolling Rock is arguarbly better than Bud or Miller. But Corono is the Mexican Budweiser, the everyman’s beer. Negra Modelo, now that’s an excellent beer. Too bad that here in the north it seems the competition has the lock on the restaurant market – can’t get Grupo Modelo stuff anywhere.
Interestingly, this little blurb just appeared in the wine column of our Atlanta alternative weekly newspaper:
“SCREW IT Have you noticed the Boone’s Farm-like closures on your favorite Down Under wine lately? These metal saviors aren’t just creeping up on us, they’re sprinting. The Aussies and New Zealanders love the screwtop, preferring it to the cork, which can pollute up to 10 percent of wine. You will continue to see more and more of the screwtop, so get over yourself and try one. Same goes for bag-in-a-box wine.”
I can attest that screwtop are here to stay. One of my favorite wines, Lucky Country Cabernet/Shiraz blend, comes in a screwtop bottle. It’s made by Two Hands, one of Australia’s better new wineries.
Interestingly, this little blurb just appeared in the wine column of our Atlanta alternative weekly newspaper:
“SCREW IT Have you noticed the Boone’s Farm-like closures on your favorite Down Under wine lately? These metal saviors aren’t just creeping up on us, they’re sprinting. The Aussies and New Zealanders love the screwtop, preferring it to the cork, which can pollute up to 10 percent of wine. You will continue to see more and more of the screwtop, so get over yourself and try one. Same goes for bag-in-a-box wine.”
I can attest that screwtops are here to stay. One of my favorite wines, Lucky Country Cabernet/Shiraz blend, comes in a screwtop bottle. It’s made by Two Hands, one of Australia’s better new wineries.
OK, I forgot that some people live in states where all bottles and cans require a deposit. That really has no bearing on my post, however, as a brewery doesn’t classify bottles by what your state’s law is. Either a bottle is re-usable (Returnable) or not.
Course, without corks, there’s no risk of your wine getting corked. Apparently supplies of the cork of sufficient quality for wine bottles are rapidly running out, and shittier cork that ends up leaving your wine ruined is more common.
Actually, the reverse is true. Falling demand of real cork is leading to the destruction of cork oak forests, which are a valuable habitat for wildlife including rare birds.
Some wine producers try to sell the total BS argument that “real cork comes from trees, so our plastic produce saves trees and is better for the environment!”.
Not so at all. Cork is harvested sustainably, so the trees are not cut down. The environmentally friendly way is to use real cork, so that cork oak forests continue to be economically viable. Otherwise they will be grubbed up.
See this article, for one: peopleandplanet.net
I’m a fan of bottle-conditioning, but let’s not overstate the case. The secondary fermentation still takes place at the brewery. The main job of the yeast in the bottle is to provide carbonation. If the entire secondary fermentation took place in the bottle, it would explode.
The Reinheitsgebot doesn’t say anything about pasteurization. It does prohibit adding additional sugars (including sucrose). Technically, it forbids adding yeast, too, as they didn’t know what yeast was back then.
Personally, I don’t understand why anyone would want to follow the Reinheitsgebot today. I love the extra flavors and complexity you can get with moderate amounts of extra additives. I’ve brewed beer using rye, wheat, clover honey, oats, and other goodies along with the malted barley and had great results.
Ditto for California.
We usually use the term refundable for the containers that we take back for a deposit. “Returnables” are really “reusables.” For some reason they’re still popular south of the border. Here, it’s a real pain in the neck, 'cos you gotta take the bottles back to the same place if you want your deposit back.
“Crown” seals are just the cap. The only difference between the traditional and the twist-offs is the bottle itself. Precisely the same machinery and “blank” seals are used to bottle either way. The only difference is the bottles. If the bottles come with a screw thread moulded into the glass, then the crown cap will take on the shape of the thread when placed under pressure by the bottling machine. This also kinda disagrees with the theory that micro-breweries don’t switch to twist-offs because of the economics of re-tooling. They don’t need to re-tool - simply order in some new bottles. Anyway, long story short - if the term “crown” is trademarked, and the breweries had permission to use it before, they would have permission still as they are still using the same blanks.
I can second this. When I was first getting into homebrewing about a decade ago, I was told that I could use either type of bottle. I found that the twist-offs had a failure rate (not properly sealing and going flat and rancid) of about ten percent, which is unacceptable. So who knows? Maybe the breweries also have a high failure rate, but since high volume mainstream sugary beer is dirt cheap to make (before all the taxes etc), perhaps they are willing to absorb the loss in the face of overwhelming evidence that the market likes twist-offs. I don’t know.
Until it becaome a casualty of the European Union’s food laws a few years ago. Or did I imagine that?
Concur. It’s a really dumb way of doing it. The surface area on the cap is so small that you need a table with a sharp edge to do it. This makes it very easy to chip the table. The only time I’ve ever used this technique myself is on a beaten-up rusty locker. It had pop-riveted construction and a sheetmetal side that had a top edge which was perfect for this. Even so, I saw a friend of mine do it on the same locker and he ended up with glass in his beer. It’s quite hard to do safely and without damaging anything.
I don’t know where these guys are getting their information from, but the Australian and NZ market most certainly does not like screwtop bottles. Yes, they are making inroads here, but they now represent only a tiny fraction of wines instead of a very tiny fraction. There are some winemakers trying to encourage their use, but others are opposed to it, and the consumers hate the idea. Maybe the screwtops are being exported to the US as a trial.
Really? I’ve always known secondary fermentation and bottle conditioning to be more or less the same thing. Beers put into a secondary vat at the brewery are usually there to “settle” and not ferment further. Bottle conditioning involves adding extra fermentables (malt or sugar) and sometimes extra yeast right at bottling time. This looks like fermentation to me! The bottles won’t explode if the fermentables are measured correctly.
This may be a terminology issue, LoadedDog. When I brew, I do a primary fermentation for a few days, typically in a plastic fermenter. I then siphon the wort into a glass carboy with an airlock for secondary fermentation. The siphoning process leaves behind various sediments that settled out during the primary fermentation.
The bottle conditioning process does use a little sugar “kickstarter,” but since you’re fermenting pure sugar, it really doesn’t change the taste of the beer noticeably. It just adds a bit more alcohol and the CO[sub]2[/sub] needed for a properly carbonated product.
Thats because pasteurisation wasnt discovered for another 350 years.
The point is when you have live yeast going into the bottle with some residual sugars, a better seal would be required - ie pop top - to keep the extra carbon dioxide in.
The pasteurised beers are perhaps less likely to require a good seal, since they keep the same level of carbonation - thus a twist top is sufficient.
Yes, I guess it must be mere terminology. I’m 100% sure that “secondary fermentation” is the bottle conditioning part as it is known amongst Australian homebrewers. One thing I don’t remember (I haven’t brewed for a few years) is the name given to the process of transferring the brew to a second carboy. I used to wait until the specific gravity was just about stable, then turn off any heating devices I was using (to minimise convection stirring up the sediment), wait a day or two, and then transfer it to the second vessel. It would be in there for another few days. This is what confused me with the different terminology - there really isn’t much going on at all by way of fermentation in the second carboy. The yeast is more or less just marking time - still alive but going a bit hungry until bottling time.
Don’t be so sure about this. I don’t know if you’ve ever done your primary fermentation with pure sugar (household) as one of the main fermentables or if you’ve ever drunk somebody else’s, but if you’ve tried it you will no doubt know about that sour “cidery” taste that gives it the evil “Uncle Lou’s Bathtab Brew” flavour. By bottle conditioning with this type of sugar, you are actually reintroducing a little of this flavour, which is a shame if you’ve gone to the trouble of making an otherwise great beer. White sucrose shouldn’t really go anywhere near the beer if you can avoid it.
Don’t get me wrong, it is only a small amount of sugar, and I used to frequently bottle with white sugar simply because it is easy (pours well through the measuring hopper). However, if you try bottle conditioning using pure malt (or at least glucose / dextrose), you’ll notice a slight but definite improvement - and homebrewing is certainly one of those hobbies which is all about making slight tweaks here and there.
Accurately measuring out pure malt into bottles can be a pain in the arse, so I used to transfer the brew into a third carboy a few minutes before bottling; this ensured zero sediment, enabling me to heartily stir the entire thirty bottles’ worth of conditioning malt directly into the beer. This technique works a treat, but you have to really stir the hell out of it to ensure even distribution. The other potential problem is you are introducing yet another air exposure to the brew, but I never managed to get it contaminated this way, so I think the risk is minimal. For ease of bottling, there is a strong argument for sticking with white sugar - which I did when making lawnmower beer.
I, too, always referred to bottle conditioning and carbon development as secondary fermentation. Regardless of what it’s really called, it’s fermenting a second time, so I leave it at that. I only ferment in the carboy, i.e., the wort goes into the carboy just as soon as I’ve cooled it (reverse radiator made from copper tubing immersed into the wort works in just a couple of minutes!). I leave it with a hose in the stopper for a couple of days, then swap the hose for the airlock when all of the foam is done coming out.
I used to use white table sugar back when I started with Mr. Beer. Don’t laugh; Mr. Beer is excellent stuff and super easy to use. Bear in mind that “excellent” is in comparison to Bud-Miller-etc and not to better beer!
I’d been using corn sugar most recently for bottle fermentation. I’ll try malt next time. I’ve stopped using bottles altogether, though. Too much a pain in the butt. I got my hands instead on an old soda syrup container – corny keg – and a CO2 bottle, and depending on the type of beer (or my impatience :)) I just throw the corn sugar into the keg or use the sugar and give it gas. The problem, of course, is sharing the beer outside of the house. Oh well, one day I’ll get once of those bottle fillers that fill the bottle under pressure right from the keg. I think there’ relatively cheap – just haven’t done it. Then conditioning and bottling will be so super easy that I’ll wonder why I ever stopped bottling in the first place.
'Course I’m working in a foreign country right now, and don’t know if they’ll throw me into the slammer if I try to break the Corona monopoly. 