Why I'm never using Steinlager bottles for home brewing again

I was bottling beer in the weekend (a nice Miner's Stout) when for the 501st time, the Steinlager bottle I was capping refused to cap as the grippy bit at the top of the bottle neck cracked.

You see, as the pressure of the bottle capper comes down, the glass simply gives way.

I suspect this is a time / use-related issue. Over time, the pressure gets too strong for the glass and it simply breaks.

I've also had plenty of bottlenecks completely snap too.

I'm sick of this shit.

So I dumped every green Steinlager bottle that I had into the recycling bin. About 30 of them, collected (and drank!) over the last few years.

Good riddance.

But it's a real shame as the 750 ml Steinlager bottle is a really nice bottle to hold when pouring a beer into a glass. There's something really aesthetically pleasing about it too.

Don't get me wrong though, Steinlager is an excellent beer and one I would recommend to any discerning beer drinker.

So this got me thinking, what beer bottles are really good for using with homebrew?

Well, for this brewer, a side effect of the rise in craft beer is that there are a plethora of bottles out there to choose from.

I found that most brown bottles of craft beers in New Zealand are able to be capped really quite well.

But you know what works the best?

750 ml Tui crate bottles.

That's right, the other classic NZ working man's beer has the best bottles for capping homebrew.

While I'm at it, I found a great source of getting bottles for homebrew conditioning is by raiding the recycling bins of my neighbours!

Also, I'm still pretty happy about my discovery on how to easily remove beer bottle labels.

Leave a Comment bottle caps, bottling beer, steinlager, tui

Best beer bottle caps and cappers - how and what to use when bottling beer

Beer caps and cappers - how and what to use when bottling beer

Once I was bottling beer I got about 10 bottles into capping them and I remembered that I hadn’t added any sugar for carbonation.

I quickly opened the beers and added the sugar and got back to it.

But what if I had forgotten to add the sugar?

That’s a beer bottling horror story right there.

NE how, this is a nice point to talk about what kind of bottle caps you can use to put on your carefully crafted home brew.

The answer is that you can use pretty much any crown seal on your beer but you just need to remember that some crown seals are better than others. 

In my experience is best to go with a branded bottle cap rather than the cheapest you can find. I've found the cheaper ones tend to be less forgiving when using a bottle capper and they are more prone to being rendered unusable if you make a mistake. 

The ever-popular beer company, Mr Brewer has a handy pack of 144 crown metal caps for a fair price. There is actually plenty of caps to choose from on Amazon - compare the prices and options. 

What do I use to cap beer bottles with?

You need a beer capper! Beer cappers come in two forms, being the 'hand held' wing tool and the bench capper.

The 'wing' hand held capper

The hand held capper is a popular way to cap your beer. Often called 'wing' or universal Rigamonti cappers or Red Baron, they are pretty handy and durable to use.

Sometimes they are called the 'Mad Millie' or the Emily! Mad Millie reminds us of an old girl friend but we digress...

They do have a couple of draw backs - they can sometimes be hard to separate from the capped bottle if you've applied too much pressure and if you do apply to much force, then you can break the glass bottle. This happens fairly often in my experience (as I am a very muscled man) or the bottles have been reused too much and they final succumb to the pressure (of my very manly arms)....

Overall, they are pretty good units to use. It's actually very satisfying getting a cap on a bottle properly, there's this sudden 'thump' moment when the crown bends down and forms the seal.

Most US beer bottles take a 26 mm crown cap, most others take a 29 mm cap. The "jaws" on the red capper can be pulled out and reversed to crimp size 29 caps. They can be lodged in quite tight, but they are easy to pull out with a pair of pliers.

Can get a bit tiring on the arms after a while - so you might want to consider using a:

Using a Bench Capper for capping brews

The bench capper can be very easier to use than a wing capper because it's a simple pull down lever that can be operated with one hand whilst the other hand holds the bottle in place.

It's hard to make a mistake with such a method!

It's a good idea to buy a bench capper that can accommodate different sized bottles. The Ferrari model does exactly that which can be quite handy if your bottle collection is all kinds of different shapes and sized.


The Ferrari capper has the following specifications:

• Spring loaded
• Caps bottles quickly, cleanly, and accurately
• Has a magnetic bell to hold the cap in place
• Self-adjusting spring-mounted capping mechanism
• Easier to adjust for different size bottles

These are the characteristics you should bear in mind for any bench capper that you might be thinking of buying.

We'll leave with this final tip:


Do I need to sanitize the bottle caps before capping the bottle?

As always, before capping your beer, the bottle caps could to be sanitized before doing so. The best the best way is to soak them in sanitizing solution. That way the whole cap gets sanitized.

But, I'll tell ya the truth, I never actually do this tip, as long as the caps are clean, there should be no problem. And I don't think I ever ever had one.

You can use a Star San solution or some sodium percarbonate to kill the bugs.

Beer caps which absorb oxygen from the bottled beer are also a popular thing.

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How do 'oxygen absorption' bottle caps work?

Dedicated brewers will know that beer exposure to oxygen should only occur before fermentation and not after

It's the same with food - oxygen will damage food so that's why many foods are packaged in plastic with 'oxygen scavaging' features - look at potato chips, the bags they come in are filled with nitrogen!

So if you are trying to minimize the amount of oxygen in your bottled beer, mead or wine, you may want to consider using oxygen absorbing caps.

The bottling process can add unwanted oxygen into the beer if you are not careful and too rough with your wort. 

To remediate this you can do things like being careful with your pouring into the bottle and using a bottling wand.

If you want to do more than that, the bottle caps can help remove the oxygen that sits above the surface of the beer and between the bottle cap.

If you are looking to cellar or age your beer, these caps could help you achieve your goal.

Do oxygen bottle caps really work?

Now, let's take a skeptical view of this concept first. 

Do you really need to remove oxygen from the beer bottle?

If you have bottle-conditioned 1000 beers and never had a problem, do you even need to use these crowns?

If you are intending to age beers or extend the hoppiness of your beer, they can certainly give your beer the edge.

The loss of hops aroma can be one of the first signs of oxidation.

In addition, the compounds extracted from hops will can with oxygen, which forms inert compounds that have less aroma and thus a reduction in hop flavor.

Bottle caps which 'scavenge' oxygen from the beer will help prevent or delay this reaction from occurring.

If the food production and beer brewing industries spending millions of dollars doing it, then it surely works.

If you intend to drink your beers quickly, you may not need them.

How do oxygen absorption bottling caps work?

Oxygen-absorbing caps have an internal liner that once activated by water, will absorb oxygen in the headspace of the bottle.

Oxygen absorbing technology is based on oxidation or a combination of one of the following components: iron powder, ascorbic acid, photosensitive polymers, and helpful enzymes (amylase enzyme is really good for brewing actually).

Glucose oxidase is an enzyme that is popular in the elimination of O2 from bottled beer or wine.

The question you need to ask yourself is to what degree do they work and how much of an effect will they have on your beer.

Some brewers think they are only good enough to give worrisome brewers piece of mind!  Given they are only a few cents more per cap, this can make it worth it. 

How do you use oxygen absorbing caps?

These caps activate once you get them wet. 

So once they are capped on, you can invert the beer to wet the inside of the cap and they will stand ready to begin absorbing oxygen. This process starts a day or two after they first get wet. 

>> Side note - if you are adding sugar to your beer bottle at a time, the inversion will make sure no sugar stays in the bottle neck. This is not an issue if you are batch priming the whole wort with sugar)

For clarity, store your brew normally after the inversion.

Many suppliers recommend to not wet or sanitize caps in advance of your bottling session or they will not work correctly. They’ll still close the bottle off from the air like any other cap, but the oxygen-absorbing function will be used up. 

This does mean you can sanitize them just prior to use. 

But that might lead you to ask:

Do I need to sanitize oxygen-absorbing caps?

This author personally no longer sanitizes beer caps. They come out of their bag clean and frankly after 1000s of beers bottled without them, I've never had a problem. 

That said, if it is your standard practice to sanitize caps, then a quick dunk in some Star San is just fine, as long as you do it just prior to bottling and not well in advance. This is because the wetness activates the liner of the cap.

But frankly, we've given up sanitizing beer caps and we've never had any issues - they are kept well clean in bags prior to use.

The choice as the brewer, is always yours!

Check out the range and price on Amazon

Leave a Comment absorption caps, bottle caps, crown, oxygen