An Embarassment of Riches?

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wildoates

NewBee
Registered Member
Mar 22, 2009
2,373
4
0
Elk Grove, CA
My daughter has been busy trying to organize all the mess of bottles we have in the garage, HAVE had in the garage for about three years.

Check out the photo of the BEFORE and tell me you haven't had a similar situation, collecting various bottles from all comers and never quite getting them put to rights. :)

A cousin has a small cherry orchard on her property and she is going to give me some of the honey collected from the bees that service it. I can't wait to taste it and to make mead with it. Heh heh heh
 
If I told you my basement/garage/kitchen never looked like that, I'd be lying... probably be lying if I said the basement didn't look like that right now. Although I did get 20 beer bottles scrubbed and unlabelled, 10 more are soaking...

But I've given up on being embarrassed by it. If at first you don't succeed (especially if it involves housecleaning), lower your standards, step around the heap ;D
 
I have my own messy collection of bottles. I got a ton on a table in the game room, and a 4 bottle deep line of them at the foot of my bed, for lack of a better place. I guess it comes with the hobby... (I must really look like a raging alcoholic to those who don't know!)
 
My dining room looks like that right now. It's an explosion of bottles, boxes, meads to be racked, meads to be bottled, meads fermenting, and boxed meads going to a festival with us next week. I honestly can't wait 'til after the festival because I'll have my dining room back! (Seriously we need to get the inside of the building finished, and I need to get cracking on paperwork. J needs large fermentors to work with. lol)
 
Well I'm hoping to get the yard finished today, so starting tomorrow I'll get to work on the basement (and the stuff that has overflown into the kitchen).
 
Eeeek!
It reminds me of the time my friend Julia threw all the tupperware out of the kitchen cabinet with a shreik, threw it all on the follr and reorganized it.
 
Okay I have to admit, I was doing pretty good keeping all my empties stacked in boxes behind the bar downstairs. That of coarse has changed since I got those last 3 cases of flip tops off of Craig’s list. They are all now sitting in the middle of the floor downstairs waiting for me to wash them. Once I get them washed I have no Idea where they are going to go. Please no suggestions on where to stick them! :)
 
Eeeek!
It reminds me of the time my friend Julia threw all the tupperware out of the kitchen cabinet with a shreik, threw it all on the follr and reorganized it.

I'm almost there with my plasticware drawer... "why do I have 4 matching lids but can't find any of the containers???" Yeah... I totally understand.
 
My dining room looks like that right now. It's an explosion of bottles, boxes, meads to be racked, meads to be bottled, meads fermenting, and boxed meads going to a festival with us next week. I honestly can't wait 'til after the festival because I'll have my dining room back! (Seriously we need to get the inside of the building finished, and I need to get cracking on paperwork. J needs large fermentors to work with. lol)


He's got to get going on that wedding brew, eh?

All that mess is back in the garage now, but good thing the maids come on Friday because the dining room floor is a dusty mess. We'll start making wedding beer next week...it's got to be done before I leave for England on July 2nd or we won't have time for it to finish before my niece's wedding in August.

With all those bottles, though, we still don't have enough to bottle the FOUR batches of lambic we've had aging for a year and more. Silly us. :)
 
I was just running the math last night to figure out how many beer bottles will need for each common batch size and that comes out to a LOT of bottles fast...
 
He's got to get going on that wedding brew, eh?

All that mess is back in the garage now, but good thing the maids come on Friday because the dining room floor is a dusty mess. We'll start making wedding beer next week...it's got to be done before I leave for England on July 2nd or we won't have time for it to finish before my niece's wedding in August.

With all those bottles, though, we still don't have enough to bottle the FOUR batches of lambic we've had aging for a year and more. Silly us. :)

The mead is in a very large barrel as we speak. Beer will be started in August I think for early-October nuptials! By the by our (partial) wedding menu was featured on Offbeat Bride!
 
Yeah, no kidding... We had very good mostly local food for our wedding, we never could have afforded something like your proposed spread! :) (of course, not being coastal, seafood really doesn't fall under "local"). At least our cake was cool (a gingerbread castle, complete with landscaping, our D&D miniatures, a dragon, a catapult loaded with allspice berries, and a cauldron for boiling oil, and if we'd remembered to pack some corn syrup, it even would have worked).
 
Back to the original topic of messy basement/garages. Started trying to clean mine up last night and it involves cleaning and de-labeling 12 cases of wine bottles. 1st case went nice and smooth, soaked it hot water and the labels just fell right off. Started on a 2nd case and they are the most stubborn bottles. Soaking made no dent in the labels, so I scraped which just left a sticky mess on the bottles, so I soaked some more. That did nothing so I went to the Goo-Be-Gone, all that seems to have done is spread the stickiness around. Uggghhhhh!!!
 
Yeah, I've found the trick with goo-gone is every wipe has to be with a clean section of paper towel, otherwise yeah, it just smears around. Next time I get one of those really smeary labels, I may try saturating the adhesive with goo-gone, then giving it 5 minutes to loosen it up, then putting straight dish soap on it and seeing if it'll scrape or scrub off then, the dishsoap might keep it from sticking to the bottle again.

Some labels just aren't worth fighting with. And when I find one of those, at least I get a deposit back for returning it to the beer store for recycling...
 
Since you know know the nature of these labels already (I usually don't know they're going to be like that till after soaking), maybe try hitting the whole dry label with the goo-gone, give it 5 min, and see if most of the adhesive comes off when you scrape the paper off? Might work...