If you are old like me you immediately would think of this fantastic song by Hot chocolate. (It is actually called Emma but I don’t know any songs about her.)
Years ago I bought an Emily from Brouwland and I was pretty impressed by it. You can put a crown cap on beer bottles and you can also use it for champagne bottles for sparkling wine. I used to use the plastic corks for champagne bottles but I was not very happy with them because they would sometimes leak, removing most of the spark from sparkling.
To my surprise I learned that some people have the same problem with the crown caps placed with the Emily. I checked it with a friend who is a member of a Dutch beer forum and he confirmed that some members had similar problems. I was a little bit shocked because I was aware of a cheaper black model that was well known for not working so we decided to choose for the best model.
I do not use crown caps for beer making but flip top bottles and I did not make champagne for a long time and I realized that I had not used the caps before. Time for a test.
Yes. That does not look good. The cork has a big dent and probably the sides are pulled up so this could be leaking.
My friend explained to me that you can adjust this by unscrewing the metal dome in the middle that presses the cap. Unfortunately that did not work.
I tried to place another crown cap using less force. I removed the Emily and that looked a lot better. I placed the Emily again on the cap and pressed harder, and then very hard. I bent the handles to a point where I thought that I would break something. The cap still looked good. Barely a dent. I tried another cap and it looked good again. I tried it again and again. All of them look good. You can see that the cap is actually a little damaged from pressing very hard. But no dent!
BUT WHAT DID I DO?
At first I did not understand why the cap was dented. I thought it happened because I pressed too hard and the pin in the center dented the cap.
WHAT actually happened was this:
I pressed hard and the cap got stuck in the metal dome. When you try to open the capper, the red pin with the magnet in the center pushes down on the cap, making a dent.
So this problem was caused by me: I pushed too hard!
I wanted to know if more people had problems so I checked some reviews. Finding out in the process that Emily is also known as Red baron.
Most of the people give it a perfect score.
Which makes me happy because I don’t want to feel like we are selling bad products.
Some thing that can be read in the reviews is that not all bottle openings are suitable, so if there is a problem you may need a different type of bottle.
Hans
