Production delay notice: order volume is high and we're behind. We're working hard, but capacity is limited.
Currently shipping about 1 week after order. See our production and shipping page for how we work.
Most of our information is available on other pages in the Info section. Here we've collected some common questions. If you don't see an answer here or in other pages on the site, please email info@bottlemark.com and we'll be happy to help.
Nope. You can order just one custom cap if you are so inclined. (If you ask nicely, we'll even sell you an empty box, but that's just silly.)
For orders over 2,000 we can't guarantee our usual production window. We ask that you contact us if you want to order more than that so we can talk schedule. See our large orders page.
Currently, you cannot order with more than 50-55 designs in the shopping cart at any one time. (Quantity of caps, either per design or per order, is unlimited. Individual design entries in the cart is what's limited.) If you would like to order more than 50 designs, please place multiple orders and we'll combine the shipping charges. You can also order the first batch with Priority Only shipping and the rest with Local Pickup, such that the shipping charges are immediately ready to charge, no refund needed. Be sure to note what you're doing in the special instructions of each order.
They sure are! That's innovation at work.
Our caps will work for twist-off or pry-off. Twist-off-ness is based on the bottle: if your bottle has threads molded into it, the cap will twist off once applied. Home brewers can use twist-offs successfully, but you should use a stand capper to accurately and easily apply the much-greater force needed. A selection of cappers is available on our Amazon affiliate store. Also, don't reuse twist-off bottles too many times, since they are weaker than standard bottles and break more easily.
Our caps are made for bottling, so the insides come with plastic liners, unlike some craft-only caps. Our caps come in a "raw" form, ready for application to a bottle, which has flared sides. Caps coming off a bottle have straight sides. See the photos in About Our Caps. If you have access to a capper, you can cap and remove yourself (a twist-off bottle makes this easier); if not, we can do it for you for a small fee. See the crafting store section for more information on this and other services. A selection of cappers is available on our Amazon affiliate store.
Our inks are fairly rigid and may crack when the cap is bent in some form, so various techniques like flattening may not work well. More information about this will be available soon.
Most home brewers work in 5 gallon batches, which will fill 50-60 standard bottles, depending on how you fill, spill, and test. Lots of people (like us!) fill their carboys past the 5 gallon mark, and tend to end up on the high end of that range. We recommend 60-65 caps per batch so you don't run out and can have a few extra for mistakes and as a souvenir.
If you're doing a crafting project, get a few more than you need. Bottle caps are an industrial product, and do have occasional blemishes and defects.
We go as fast as we can, but orders are first-come, first-served and we have a limited production capacity. Usually we can ship in in a few business days, but in some cases it may take a week or two before we ship. Our front page has a current production estimate. Let us know your bottling or event date as a comment on the order form, and we'll try to get it there on time. For home brewing, we recommend ordering when you brew to make sure you have your caps before you want to bottle. Please see the shipping page for more.
If you use Express shipping we'll expedite your order, so you may receive your order in 2-3 days. Email if you need it faster than that!
Google Wallet (formerly Google Checkout) manages our orders; check there to see the details or shipping status of your order. That information is not yet available on bottlemark.com. For an estimate of shipping time, see the front page or email us.
We currently can only offer white base caps standard. We hope to offer other base colors in the future when the technology allows. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook and you'll know when it happens. We won't have edge print capability for some time, if ever.
Sorry, no. We only have the "mid-size" 26mm cap, which is common throughout the world. We don't have the larger 29mm size cap, which is used in Europe (common on Belgian beers) and on champagne bottles. We do get requests for the larger caps, so we hope to add it in the future, but have no immediate plans.
Probably. They are plated steel with plastic liners; some recycling facilities can handle them, others cannot. Check with your local recycler and see.
No; not for capping bottles, at least. There are a number of other clever uses, though.
No, sorry. That printing is done under the liner before the cap is formed.
Yes, as special order. We only have them in gold, which doesn't work well with light colors, so they are not generally available.
We have tested iodophor, Star-San, alcohol, and bleach with no ill results. These solutions should be used only for the short time necessary for them to work, and not overnight (long soaking can rust the edges of the caps). Use the proper amount of solution; high concentrations may have poor results (excess iodophor can stain the base cap, for example.) Use of other solutions is untested, and is done at your own risk. Boiling may soften or detach the PVC liners, so DO NOT BOIL your caps. Believe it or not, most breweries do not sanitize their caps; ours are subject to extra handling, so we think some sanitization step is a good idea.
The online design tool accepts JPG, GIF, and PNG, the standard image formats of the web. Almost any graphics software should be able to output these. PNG is preferred in general since it supports transparency and preserves every pixel (unlike JPEG, which uses "loss-y" compression). If you have some other format and can't convert it, email us and we can probably help.
We recommend an image with at least 300 pixels in the area you'll put on the cap. This allows a good resolution when printing on the appx. 1 inch wide surface of a bottle cap. A 300x300 pixel image is good for an image specifically designed for a bottle cap. Currently 1MB is the max uploadable image size.
The design saving feature is for your convenience when ordering again; we can print an unsaved design just fine. So an unsaved design is okay. It's nice to save your design, though, so (1) you can reorder easily and (2) it gives us a name for what we're producing, which is often helpful.
You bet. In the Google Wallet checkout screen, you can request that we include a gift message and/or gift receipt under "Additional options". The gift receipt will include both billing and shipping addresses, but no prices.
Your JPEG (probably created with an Adobe tool) uses an unusual "CMYK" image format that we can't handle. The easiest fix is to save it as or convert it to a PNG. Alternately you can change an Adobe JPEG file to match our RGB color palette with this procedure: click on Image in the menus, select Mode and then RGB color. Then re-save the file as a new JPEG.
Any reasonably recent browser should work. If not, email info@bottlemark.com to report a bug. We prefer Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and the site will always work well on those. We also officially support Internet Explorer 8 and above; IE 7 should also work; IE 6 is very old (from 2001) and cannot run our advanced design tool. Some versions of Safari appear to have problems uploading a file to the design tool.
See the checkout page for more info. Google Wallet (formerly Google Checkout) is a service like PayPal or Amazon Payments that processes online orders. You do need a Google account, but creating one is as easy or easier than ordering on most online stores—and you only have to do it once!
Besides being easy to use, we also figure Google is a better bet for safe credit card processing than doing it ourselves. We hope you agree; if for some reason Google Wallet is a problem for you, email us. We want to know! We do accept PayPal as well.
Yes. We prefer Google Checkout at this time since it is better integrated with our system, but we can send you a PayPal invoice. Email us to place an order via PayPal. Such orders may be delayed as they must be manually processed.
At any time before checkout, while still on bottlemark.com, visit this url: http://www.bottlemark.com/applycertificate
On that page, enter the gift certificate code in the box. Once done, your gift certificate value will appear in the upper-right corner of each page on our site. When you check out, the gift certificate value will be automatically applied to your order, including basic shipping. If you'd like to apply more for upgraded shipping please note so in the Special Instructions and we will adjust the charges by hand. If you have enough gift certificate value to pay for the whole order, you will still go through the checkout process, but you will be charged nothing.
We only charge when we are ready to create your custom caps and/or ship your order. Any immediate charges you see are "pre-authorizations" or "authorization holds" placed by our payment processor to verify the charge. You may also see multiple identical charges when we actually charge your card, $1 charges, or other oddities. This is a common (if confusing) practice in the credit card industry. These authorization charges are temporary, and should disappear on their own after we charge your card for real, or simply after a few days. For more information, see the Google Wallet explanation of multiple charges or the Wikipedia page.
home | upload & customize | library
info : contact us | production/shipping | help | faq | press | more…
Copyright © 2011,2012 BottleMark LLC. All rights reserved.
Find us on…
