Should you cap your beer bottles as you fill them or at the end of bottling?

Should you be capping your bottles as you go or should you wait and cap them all at the end of bottling? We break down what you should be doing in this week's episode of BrewTalk with Mr. Beer. 

I saw this question presented in our Facebook group the other day and I thought It was very interesting.

This is not something that we explicitly call out in our instructions, so I thought it would be good to discuss this topic.

So in an official capacity, you should cap your bottles right after you fill them, and there are a few reasons for that.

Also, I don’t see any real benefit to filling all your bottles then capping them all at the end. All you are doing is creating the risk for infection.

The first is just having them sit there with no caps on and the beer in them, it can open up the risk for them to get an infection.

You could have anything floating around in the air that could just drop into your bottle of beer and cause an infection. You want to keep those caps sitting on your bottles at all times.

A proper procedure for helping to keep your bottles safe and clean should be like this.

Sanitize your bottles.

Pour out the sanitizer and put the cap on top of the bottle, you don’t need to tighten it, just set it on top.

Then when you are ready to fill your bottle, add your carbonation drops, then fill your bottle with beer, then cap it.

That would be the best way to minimize the risk of infection during bottling by reducing the amount of time the inside of the bottles is not covered after sanitizing.

Cheers,

Robert