Last night I had wine bottles on my mind as I fell asleep. I also had wine in my belly from celebrating my husband’s promotion. I am a home brewer, I make mead. So I have supplies necessary to safely brew and store fermented beverages. I have not brewed any batches in a while but I have kept up with my routine of saving empty wine bottles for my product (several crates worth). Hurricane season is right around the corner I figured I could easily and very cheaply/no cost supplement our water supply by filling all my extra wine bottles.
Anyone done this?
How would I need to prepare the water before bottling in order to keep drinking water?
I planned on using real cork (like I have on hand) and storing bottles on their side (which keeps the cork).
Glass is always a safe bet to store water in though it has it’s limitations. If the cork seals the bottle air tight not allowing bacteria in overtime then I don’t see a problem but I would research this aspect more before depending on such a water source.
Glass bottles have a variety of uses; storage, containers, early warning devices, Molotov cocktails, even heard of folks crushing glass and loading it in shot shells when there was no lead available.
I would save your bottles for wine making since a case of purified water in plastic bottles runs under $3.00 in most discount food stores. My local source is the Aldi food store chain which sells a 24 bottle case of PurAqua 17oz bottles for $1.99 that I rotate out every 18 months or so. Another suggestion is to visit your local Wal-Mart and pick up some seven gallon Aquatainer BPA free water jugs which sells for under $9.00, just fill and rotate the water every year and you would have a safe and dependable water storage plan.
Two liter soda bottles and your typical plastic water bottles sold here in the US leech BPA into the water they are holding. This effect is enhanced when exposed to sunlight.
So don’t use those with BPA. Look for the little recycle triangle on the plastic (It’s not required, but you see it a lot). Within the triangle, there is a number. If that number is “7”, it MAY contain BPA. If it’s a different number, relax.
Don’t forget that water will be stored with air. Your Mead is high alcohol which by nature kills off germs and preserves. Also other ongoing reactions with the gasses that form. I’m not sure that water and air is necessarily a good long term deal. All preservation seesm to have some sort of other element that you won’t want in your water… Like sugar, salt, alcohol, or something. I mean they used to bury meat in the ground to preserve it. I’ve seen my father preserve a ham and it came out covered in mold but there is always something else of a chemical reaction going on.
Water and air just sounds like it’s only going to go a bad way because no other positive reaction is going to take place… I don’t know for certain… those are just my thoughts on preserving things. I used to brew as well and even that can go bad… although Mead is a long keeper deal. My father used to preserve salt fish and hams. We also used to have vinegars with the "mother’. sour dough, even this slightly fermenting never ending mix of fruit - forget what that was… but they all had in common some chemical reaction that actually ‘preserved’ the desired item.
Unless you are planning to lug around a lot of wine bottles it might be a better idea to learn to fashion some sort of water storage and filtration system and just make more Mead.
My thinking is…fill sterilized bottles woth purified water…cork, and then maybe seal with melted wax, should be good to go for a long time? And unless an out an out emergency, I aint drinking no water that’s been in a plastic bottle longer than 5-6 months.