Removable and Reusable Labels for Home Brew Bottles

The other day I realized, my home brew bottles are naked! They don’t have fancy labels like all those commercial beers do… I hope they don’t feel embarrassed when I take them to a friend’s house. I’m lazy and just write one or two identifying letters on the cap with a sharpie. H = Hefe, PA = Pale Ale, S = stout, etc… It’s ghetto but it works.

Why I don’t normally label:

A) Labels take time to make.

B) Since I re-use my bottles, that means eventually having to peel off the label. With a standard label, that requires warm water, soap, a scrubber, and some elbow grease. What a pain!

The solution I would need for it to make sense to label my home brew more often:

A good looking label that goes on and stays on, but then easily peels off and can be reused multiple times. Here comes BeerClings to the rescue! The owner of Beer Clings contacted us about their product and sent us a free sample to play with. Pretty neat idea, and it really makes that naked home brew bottle look ready for a night on the town. The label stays on great – even weeks later! It peels off easy, and goes back onto the original sheet with out a problem.

The makers of the Beer Cling are well aware they need to come out with lots more templates, and allow brewers design their own logos.

There are two aspects to labeling:

One is the aesthetic component. Home brewers are proud of their beer (at least the good batches). Decorating the bottle with a label is a nice touch. We’ve tested doing wax seals on the caps, that is fun but a bit of work. BeerClings helps to address this, and once they get more patterns to choose from, for only $5 per sheet, I think they will be in a great niche.

The second component to labeling is record keeping. Knowing what is in the bottle is good. Especially if you are taking it to a club and passing it around.  Knowing the IBU, SRM, ABV, OG/FG, style, and who brewed it is even better! This goes for Kegging beer too! I use post it notes to keep track of which keg is which, again the bare minimum. It would be nice to have the ABV and IBU on a label posted right on the keg (or by the tap).

How we are going to support labeling:

Here at Brewer’s Friend, we are looking into supporting label making in some fashion. There is a thread in the forum going on about labeling. There are several links in there and ideas from fellow brewers on how they label their bottles.

At the very least, the recipe editor should have a button to generate text from the recipe that can be copied and pasted into Word or Open Office. It would be nice to include the recipe name, style, and stats like IBU, SRM, ABV, etc.  I just ordered a set of Avery removable labels to play with. That would be best of both worlds – the ability to print whatever you want on the label, and the ability to remove it easily when the bottle is empty.

One last thing I thought was cool, BeerClings also makes these wooden prohibition style crates (I want one):

Post by Brewer Larry