Should you squeeze the air out of your bottles after you fill them?
This is a topic that we were discussing amongst ourselves the other day. Does squeezing the air out of your bottles after you fill them do anything? We break it down in this quick episode of BrewTalk with Mr. Beer.
The thought behind this is that you have a little bit of oxygen in that headspace between the top of the liquid and the top of the bottle. Oxygen as we know is not something that you want to get into your beer and it can create off-flavors.
The main flavor when describing a beer that has been oxidized is that it has a cardboard or papery taste to it.
So by squeezing that little bit of oxygen out you are preventing your beer from getting oxidized.
To answer the question should you do this or not, our answer is no. For a few reasons.
So our first feeling on this issue is that you are adding your carbonation drops or sugar before you fill your bottle with beer. Once you fill your bottle with beer the yeast will detect that there is simple sugars in your bottle and get to work on eating those up which will cause an off-gas which would push out the oxygen.
Another reason why you would not want to do this is because of the damage it might cause to the bottles. By squeezing the bottles like that it could compromise the integrity of the bottles and decrease the useful lifespan of them.
So to sum it up our recommendation is that you do not need to squeeze the air out of your bottles once you fill them with beer.
It's not going to give you any real benefit and will reduce the integrity of your bottles quicker.
Cheers,
Robert