Since I am soon turning 21 and myself and a friend of mine enjoy sampling a new beer everytime we go out and buy alcohol, I decided that I wanted to keep a cap of every different type of beer I tried and display them somehow. I'm just not so sure how to display them. I thought a good idea might be to buy a framed whiteboard and glue each bottle cap to it. While this is a decent idea, I realized that the bottle caps may not line up correctly or there might be extra white space because X number of bottle caps doesn't match the width or the length of the white space correctly. Anyone have any bright ideas or prior experience with displaying bottle caps?
I met some guys a few years ago who took a coffee table that had a raised edge all the way around it and filled the inside with bottle caps. Then they bought a piece of glass that fit inside the raised edge and laid that on top of the caps. (Does the type of coffee table I'm trying to describe make sense?)
make a coffe table or bar and carve circles into it and put the caps into the circles. (each circle same circumference as the bottle cap, and space them out evenly) It's looks cool. We did it to our Coffee table. When I move this fall, I might do it to a bar too.
I actually work at an apartment complex and the other day I was escorting the exterminator to each apartment that needed spraying. I saw those beer cap bars in 3-4 apartments. I'd like to wall-mount them if possible.
Hey that's funny; my floormates and I too get new types of beer (bottles only for this reason; cans when we feel like power hour before psych or religion or anthro) and collect all the caps. For 1.5 semesters, we've got 60 different brands bottles with hundreds of caps. What we have decided to do with the extra bottles was fun to think about; at one point we were saving them up to bottle our own dormmade brew (yes, probably against the rules and all) with a Mr. Beer kit or something. THat never transpired, so instead we're going to hang the bottles (brown, clear, and green) on some type of string or hemp or rope (drilling small holes through the bottom of the bottle with a Dremel) and making our own window blinds for next year (wind chimes when the window is open). For the caps, I came across these just hours ago (Click the links): 1 2 3 4 5 6
Be careful if you do that and make sure that you let the beer ferment long enough before you try to bottle it. I had a friend that didn't wait long enough and had a couple of bottles explode on him while he was moving them. Also, you might want to wait until you move off campus. Brewing it yourself can get mighty stinky.
If you take a gravity reading before you bottle and it less than 1.012 for a typical beer (lager, amber, brown, pale ale, golden ale) you should be ok. When you make the higher gravity beers, they can be anywhere from 1.016 to 1.025 just depending on the unfermentable sugars. I've been brewing beer for a while and have never had bottles explode. I have had some beers take a long time to carbonate, because of either a low yeast count or the alcohol percentage was too high and the yeast could not tolerate it. If anyone is ever interested in this hobby, visit John Palmer's webiste: http://howtobrew.com/intro.html
What swilkins said about exploding bottles. If you're bottle fermenting, too much bottling sugar causing over-carbonation is the culprit for explosion. Plus, I would not recommend re-using bottle caps. Risky.
I think the guy I knew was fermenting it in a 5 gallon bucket, if I remember right. Just one of those big white buckets with a handle. I don't know how he was deciding when they needed to be bottled (nor do I really care, I'd just buy beer if I wanted beer), but I can tell you it was a lot of fun to clean up. There were little glass shards in the kitchen where it blew, as well as in three other rooms. The glass actually went through the kitchen and the living room to get to a hallway. He was lucky he only had a couple of cuts.
I made a really cool chess set out of beer bottles. Green team and a brown team bud 7 0z brown pawns - little kings green pawns red stripe brown rooks - mickey big mouth green rooks oberdorfer brown knights - grolsch green knights (both of these have the wire top and resemble armor) franzikaner (sp) brown bishop - pilsner urkell green bishop (both of these have the foil around the top of the bottle and the franzikaner actully has a picture of a monk) rogue chocolate stout brown queen - st pauli girl green queen (both of the were the big bottles and have pictures of women on them) Schlitz Malt liquor 40 oz brown king - Mickeys 40 oz. green king (both of these had twist off tops which I kept and resemble crowns) for the board i used a 4X4 piece of plywood which i paint brown and white with a green border. this was a great outdoor patio set.
At a friend's apartment, we stuck the caps into the soffit above his kitchen sink. I took about a year to fill it and move on to the rest of the ceiling. At another friend's, we used the 12 pack and case boxes to wall paper the entire 3 bedroom apartment, including the ceiling.
