Tuesday 30 July 2013

The merry chink ...

Some late bottling tonight - not just late in the day, but just plain late - batch 12, 2011...
A customer had been to the Isle of Wight and brought me some Godshill cider, (Lazy Lob) so I thought it a good idea to drink and bottle - thing is, I had to add some of mine to give it some flavour...
I've made myself a 'bottling aid' and will try and get a pic up as time permits - plenty to bottle yet...

Devon Oliver lending a hand
The Godshill Cider bottle in 'filling position' shown here.
Basically a wooden frame supporting 3 bottling tubes that are hinged and spring loaded. The bottle sits on a tilting 'cradle'  with a wire hoop (stainless steel from old wiper blades).
As the fill nears the top of the neck, the cradle is flipped forward, thus dropping the bottle around 10cm which closes the filling tube valve. Timing is a bit tricky as the fill level speeds up on reaching the neck...
Bottling time should in theory be much reduced though in not having to wait for each bottle to fill individually.
System is gravity fed with a 3 way John Guest 'splitter'...
Of course I need to get the barrel higher than the bottling position - a dead lift of 30 kilos no easy feat at my age! I need a hoist... or pump into some form of holding tank.
On the 'drop' a bit of cider is thrown out the top as well - hence the basic bottle catcher suspension - currently a plasterboard rawl plug and a bit of pipe insulation, which could be softer...
The bottles don't all fill at the same rate and can be dropped one at a time. I did experiment at getting them all to fill at the same time as 'fluid dynamics' is a bit beyond my expertise - even as a window cleaner lol.
I'll try and rig up the camera and do a video.

Heath Robinson or ingenius, ha ha..? - there's plenty of room for improvement!