I love the Home Brew Bottling Calculator and I use it every time I bottle. http://www.brewersfriend.com/bottling-calculator/ It'd be really helpful and super handy if you added a couple of slots for custom sizes. For instance, I have a at least a couple dozen 15.2 oz Grolsh bottles, a bunch of European 330 ml bottles (11.2 ounces), and some 16 ounce soda bottles I recap and use to sneak home brew into baseball games (please don't tell anyone). Thanks!
Re: bottling calculator suggestion To us, it makes sense to add the 11.2 oz and 15.2 oz bottles directly on the list, then perhaps add one or two more custom fields. We are also going to allow this calculator to support metric as well, so the timing is good. What other bottle sizes would people like to see on this calculator? How would the metric side of it work best (Liters and Milliliters??) Thanks! Larry
Re: bottling calculator suggestion I would go with Liters and Milliliters. For the metric calculater, I would suggest a "standard bottle" be 330ml.
Metric bottle sizes Fresh from yesterday's bottling run, here's what I can remember of the various metric sizes I've come across... 330ml: Common in multipacks, but also the preferred small size of continental beers like Hoegaarden. 500ml: This is the most common size for individually sold bottles, as it's the closest round metric number under 1 pint. 660ml: Various continental lagers seem to like this size, e.g. Kronenbourg. 750ml: Wine-bottle size favoured by Leffe, Hoegaarden etc... Have also seen other oddities like 250ml (from an Amstel multipack I think?), 550ml (Newcastle Brown), 620ml (Cusquena) and I think there's a few hard-line breweries in the UK that insist on an imperial pint (568ml). I'd definitely reccomend millilitres for metric, as I can't recall coming across a bottle size larger than 1 litre on general sale - in the UK at least... We don't tend to see the 40 oz bottle size here.
Re: bottling calculator suggestion Excellent information. We'll get to work on this. LOL, yeah you can easily get a 40 oz can of swill here in the US for nearly the same price as a 40 oz bottle of water. The largest mass produced bottle I've seen is 22oz. I call those 22oz bottles 'craft bottles' since all the good micro brews package into those. There are also 32 oz pop tops and even larger pop tops but they are harder to find and $$. Hmm... looks like we will be adding a ton more options to the brewing calculator after all?! Thank you.
Re: bottling calculator suggestion Here's my CA$0.02 worth. More work, I guess, but why not use a context string like they use on wolfram alpha? List a bunch of standard sizes (allow user to choose some preferred ones - I'm in Canada and *all* my bottles are 330ml and 500ml), but for the custom fields allow the user to enter a unit in a text field. Or, I guess, in a dropdown, but it's not as flexible for regionally-preferred units like dl or cl. I would like to see a form similar to this in the brew log - packaging page as well. How much did I collect when packaging??? Let me see, I had 45 33cl bottles and 3 half-litre bottles. How many gallons is that? Better metric support site-wide, that's great. However, realize that the online homebrew community is dominated by Americans, so people in Metric countries often use a mixture of metric and Imperial / Avoirdupois units. To force a user to choose always metric or always US units is not always better than just having US units. Example: I buy my hops by the ounce, measure my priming sugar by the gram, measure yeast starters by the litre, measure temperature in degrees C, measure wort collected in gallons or litres (depending which fermentation bucket I'm using). Another brewer might have a different mix of units.
Re: bottling calculator suggestion I think the 22oz is roughly interchangable with the 660ml. I think of that as the "sharing" size because it's twice 330 and would fill two continental beer glasses very nicely. Not that I actually share the contents you understand, I just drink one after the other... Now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, there's also a 275ml bottle size although it is quite rare. I think some of the smaller brewers use this size for their specialty beers. Last time I recall seeing one it was holding Harvey's Sweet Sussex, which is definitely an acquired taste (although their porter is superb).
Re: bottling calculator suggestion Just to underline this, one of my rules of thumb when putting a new recipe together is "one kilogram per gallon" (kg referring to grain), which is just all kinds of wrong when you consider that my fermenter is actually marked up in litres...
Re: bottling calculator suggestion That makes sense. After we upgrade the basic bottling calculator, we can wire it up to the screen where you record how much you packaged. The notes about mixing units is interesting. We will add flexibility where we can, I see that as a completely new thread though.
Re: bottling calculator suggestion It occurs to me to add half size growlers (32oz Grenades), and 1 gallon jugs (128 oz). This list is getting nuts, but it's going to be awesome.
Okay, the new bottling calculator is up there: http://www.brewersfriend.com/bottling-calculator/ The list of default options was getting really long with some of the more rare bottle sizes. We went with the most common items and extended it to 3 custom fields instead of just 1. Metric is fully supported in Liters/Milliliters. Now taking a look at how to integrate this into the brew feature. Update - ended up starting a new topic for that: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=127
Re: bottling calculator suggestion Yes to pretty much all of the quoted stuff (I am also in Canada and constantly use Google to convert between US, Imperial, and metric...) BUT that's not why I'm commenting on a "closed" thread... I might have missed it but is there a section for logging how many bottles of a particular size I got from my batch? I see the option to estimate the number of bottles I need based on my input amounts, but usually by the time I've racked a couple times and added my priming sugar mix I'm not sure how much I have - I just know that my current batch yielded 61 of my small glass bottles (330 ml?), not sure how much that is and the "Packaging" log entry does not seem to include an option for a bottle count.
We did have this thread open for a couple months - but nobody commented on it so I closed it. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=127 If you want we could re-open it. Honestly though, when it comes to bottling, most people opt to keg eventually. Trust me, you'll love kegging. The expense is well worth it. Some of the best money I ever spent on brewing equipment.
