Carbonating In Grolsch - Can I Trust It?

Okay, so when I first set out brewing at home, my starter kit came with 8 2-quart plastic screw-top PET bottles.  Clean.  Efficient.  Easy to sanitize and store.  Really ugly.

What I really wanted was something nicer to store, transport, and present my beer in.  Having heard that many brewers have had success with using bottle cap systems, while others have used Grolsch-style bottles with swing-top stoppers, I had a decision to make.

Well, not really.  Because the Grolsch-style bottles are just really, really pretty!

The first attempt at using Grolsch-style bottles was when bottling BB-3 Dark Ephipany.  You've seen the photos - those labeled bottles were darned sexy!  I happily bottled, carbonated, conditioned, and popped open my first Irish Stout, and the effect was nothing short of amazing.

So naturally, I was enthusiastic about sharing.  My ex-wife is just across town, and had been following my brewing exploits through our son, whom I have involved in the process since day one.  She's a Guinness fan, so one evening while taking the boy over I also schlepped a bottle of Dark Epiphany.  After a couple of days, I called to ask how it was.

She said it was flat.

Hmmm.... that's odd.  So I went downstairs into the Man Cave to retrieve an unopened bottle, and when I cracked it open I got the expected POP! FIZZ! indicative of released carbonation.  I supposed that perhaps her bottle got jostled during delivery and somehow the seal was compromised.  I drank my bottle, pulled another out for her and when I delivered this one I was careful to keep it steady.  She popped it open when I arrived, it decanted as expected, and all was well.

Or so I thought.

A couple of weeks later, while opening a bottle of Shaved Amadeus that had been sitting peacefully in the refrigeration unit, I found that it too had gone flat.  Of the 15 bottles I've put into Grolsch and have subsequently opened, two of them didn't seal properly, resulting in a half-gallon of wasted beer.

I've done a little research and have concluded that I need to add a step or two to the bottling process when using Grolsch.  Looks like I need to have a bowl full of Star San at the ready.  One poster on Homebrewtalk.com removes the entire wire cage assembly from the bottle and soaks it for a few minutes.  Then after filling, he removes the assembly from it's bowl, snaps it onto the bottle, sprays a small amount of Star San on the bottle mouth, then snaps the cap on - wiping everything down afterwards.  Supposedly this makes a positive seal between the rubber gasket and the glass bottle top.

This is a big deal, because I won't get a 2nd chance with the Christmas Stout.  Once bottled and set back, it'll be Thanksgiving before anything else happens.  If the seals fail, the beer will be as flat as can be.  I won't really know until I follow this procedure on a different batch - one that will be bottled, carbonated, and enjoyed much sooner than this November/December.  Anticipating I might want to have a batch to experiment upon, the bottling I did for Nimblejack was half-PET and half-Grolsch.  I have 4 bottles of each style.  I did not, however, use the wet seal technique described above when bottling, so even if I have a seal failure with this batch it won't indicate whether or not wet sealing will solve the problem.  All I can get out of this batch is either a negative result or a potentially false positive result.  When I bottle Browncoat tomorrow, which is scheduled for PET, and earmark 1 or 2 quarts to be put into wet-sealed Grolsch.  I should know by late July whether I have a problem or not.

Just in case I do have a seal failure, I plan to stockpile some Coopers Carbonation Drops.  These are used in place of priming sugar and can speed up the carbonation process.  I feel that using these are a bit of a "cheat", but if I've got a complicated batch of beer that has been screwed up during the final step and am looking at pouring it out and losing 6 months of work, these might be a workable "Plan B" to allow me to attempt a "save".

6 bucks for a bag, shipped, from Amazon.  Cheap, as insurance goes.