*sigh*
I hate doing “Christmas” posts this early, but I used to have to start preparing for Christmas about March (long story), and since I have to start preparing for doing something like this NEXT year NOW (IF I actually end up doing it next year–may take longer*), I suppose this is OK…
See what I mean? and the “*” above? Well, I threw a bunch of bottles out recently *sigh* and I also brew about as much as I buy, so getting enough bottles–especially green ones–may take me a while. Especially since I only manage 1-2 beers/day.
But since I must start really early preparing for this, I may as well post the intention now as well, eh?
I guess it popped into my head to look for something like this since today starts another brew season for me. First up? Three brews: a “Vienna lager” style, a wheat beer and some “Georgy-Porgy Molasses Beer” (with fewer cloves and more orange zest this year). If I get them all started today, then in a couple of weeks I may be able to start bottle conditioning enough to last me past New Year’s Day, though, of course, I’ll probably start another few batches as soon as these come out of the primary fermentation “bottles”. (I have several different primary fermentation tubs of different food grade plastics for primary fermentation. Why food grade plastics? Cheaper and easier to store, just as easy to keep clean and lighter when I have to move them. Oh, and a couple of them are from unusual *cough* sources, so cheaper still. Yeh, I’m cheap. Wanna make something of it? ;-))
Update:
Here ya go: I could fit the last 4 levels of something like this in our bay window this Xmas…
If we went through bottles I’d offer to bring you some, but the only bottles I have empty on a regular basis are Coke. We do have a lot of bottled beer in the fridge in the garage, it’s just that neither of us drink it. It is stuff that guests bring over and don’t finish. Some of it is probably pretty well “aged” at this point. 🙂
The only beer that is generally partaken of in our house is wheat. The hub likes wheat beer but prefers Crown over anything else.
Sadly, the longer a beer ages, after a certain point, the more likely it is to skunk whether it’s exposed to light the whole time or not (although light is very likely to cause a beer to skunk very, very much sooner). I like to drink my brews within a couple of months of making them. And, of course, I bottle the more “fragile” brews in dark bottles. I don’t worry at all about the wines or ciders I brew up. The wines, because I make so little of the stuff it’s usually gone sooner and the ciders because they have a much higher alcohol content and seem to just get better with aging, although I’ve not had any that lasted more than eight months. 🙂
I may look around at recycling centers and ask around here locally, but 1,000 bottles+ is a bit much. I might ought to scale things back and use glass circles to support each level, at decreasing diameters, and just increase my consumption of Grolsch in swingtops for a while. The 16oz bottles would take up more room, and the red and white caps would themselves make interesting decorative items. 🙂 Of course, at the end of the season, I’d need to come up with a storage/use plan for all the extra bottles… Hmmm, more brews? 🙂
Maybe I’ll just start with a small one in the bay window this year. It won’t be visible from outside the house, much, since I converted the thing to a faux stained glass look several years ago (a look that needs refreshing, I notice *sigh*), but it’d also not take up much room… May be a plan, and I might have enough green bottles to handle that, between my small collection of Stella Artois bottles and my Wonder Woman’s O’Doul’s bottles (her meds/cardiologist _require_ no alcohol intake for some silly reason :-))
I wonder if one could do similar with plastic green 7-Up or Mt. Dew bottles…Now that we could probably manage. 😉
I’d fill ’em with water to increase stability, were I to use something lightweight like that, and definitely use a staged platform construction method–green-painted cardboard or glass or semi-rigid clear plastic, etc.
But I have to agree, that’d definitely be one way to go!
It speaks to my inner magpie, it does.
Even though it’s too late for this year, and I don’t want to get into the glass cutting and edge polishing of the Grolsch bottle Xmas tree in the pic (too many other more pressing projects, and a quick mental glance through resources on hand says, “Not enough glass to do the job,” and I hate transporting sheets of glass, anyway), I will probably go ahead and cut and paint 3 cardboard circles and use whatever Grolsch swingtop bottles I have left from bottling up my first five brews (by that time) to make a small one for the bay window, as I had mused on. Lights up through holes in middle of cardboard circles and placed in bottles before next level? Yeh, I think it’d work OK.