Bottle Caps and Cappers
The origins of bottle caps can be raced back to examples found in Europe of cork and wood bottle stoppers. Even today most wine bottles still use cork to seal the bottles.
But by the middle of the 19th Century industrial production techniques meant that the use of glass bottles was increasing rapidly and following hand-in-hand was the development of bottle closures.
For around 60 years, from 1856 the most widely used stopper for beer bottles used a wire attached mechanical cap. This style of cap is still in use today, most notably on some Belgium beers.
In 1891, the bottle cap we are all familiar with and still the most widely used in home brewing was invented. William Painter, an Ex-pat Irishman living in Baltimore, came up with a single use cap which he called crown cork. The cap used a metal lid lined with a thin cork disc for improving the seal and protecting the drink from the metal's toxicity. This type of bottle cap is still in wide use today by the beer industry.
Working closely with the bottling industry to introduce a universal bottle neck and the development (also by Painter) of automatic capping machines, lead to a huge increase of glass bottles and in the use of crown caps. Within 30 years nearly all soft drink and beer bottles were sealed with crown caps.
During the 1960s a shortage of cork and the advent of less expensive synthetic materials lead to the substitution of the cork lining in crown caps with plastic. The 1960 also saw the introduction of twist off caps.
Today in the United States, aluminium and plastic pilfer proof (PP) caps are used in place of crown caps on glass and plastic beverage containers. However, Europe and in particular the United Kingdom haven’t abandoned the Crown cap and are using more than at any time in their history.
For homebrew, crown caps are cheap, easy to apply and widely available. Check on Ebay for crown caps.
