A few months ago, I visited the Illawarra Brewing Company’s new brewing set-up at North Wollongong. While I was there, Ashur, one of the brewers, found I’d started homebrewing and handed me a stack of old Five Islands Brewing Company bottlecaps they’d had lying around.
It was much appreciated both because they’re nice-looking caps (much better than the plain old red ones I had at home) and also because it means I wouldn’t have to place stickers on the caps to help me tell one brew from another (which I have to do with those red ones – using my daughter’s stickers from her old toilet training chart in case you care).
Ashur recommended I whack them in some boiling water first because they’d been sitting around for a while. I did that – but didn’t think to let them dry properly before storing them. And so I opened them today while bottling my latest homebrew … and discovered that many of them had started to rust.
Sorting through them, roughly half of the caps had to be chucked because of rust spots. So there’s a mistake I’m not going to make twice.