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Is It Best To Bottle Homebrew In Stubbies Or Longnecks? When bottling your homebrew one of the considerations is what size bottle should use when storing beer. Does it make any difference to the quality of the beer or the carbonation?
Stubbies are the preferred size to bottle homebrew because they improve the quality of the beer that reaches the glass. The beer poured from a stubby will generally result in less sediment getting into your final drink. This is because the beer can be poured into the glass in one go which reduces the amount the sediment is disturbed and therefore transferred into the glass. To read more about the sources of sediment and how to minimize there click here.
The other advantage of using stubbies is that they are much more widely used by commercial brewers. This means that that it is easy to recycle beer bottles that have been used. Beer is rarely sold on longnecks and if it is many of the companies use twist-top lids which are not suitable for the cappers used by most homebrewers. To read more about the types of bottles that are most suitable for recycling click here.
In terms of the conditioning of the beer within the bottles ie carbonation, my experience has been that there is no significant difference in the final product is produced. However, the period of time taken to achieve an adequate degree of carbonation is longer. This primarily because you need to add approximately twice the sugar which takes longer to react. It is recommended that you age the beer for at least 3 weeks.
Additionally, there are often practical advantages associated with stubbies versus longnecks in terms of fitting bottles into the fridge. Longnecks can be more difficult to fit into the fridge due to the height and width.
What Are The Advantages Of Longnecks?
While stubbies will produce a clearer drink longnecks do have a couple of advantages. The first is that due to the increased volume of beer per bottle there are less bottles to wash which makes the bottling process faster. The other advantage of longnecks is that the temperature fluctuates less in storage. This is simply because the volume of liquid in the bottles is greater which means it takes longer for the temperature to rise or fall within the environmental conditions in storage.