What happens when your favorite brew doesn’t come with a twist-off cap and you’ve turned the kitchen upside down and still can’t find the bottle opener?!
Think twice and then think one more time before you even try to use your teeth. Have you seen the price of dental visits these days?
Instead, I’ve compiled a handy list of alternative ways to open beer bottles without an opener. Perhaps you should hang it on your fridge, next to the list of emergency contact numbers.
Use Some Alternative Household Objects
Your home is a treasure trove of interesting, and potentially useful, items. Many of them may help you open a beer bottle, but stay away from anything that’s too flimsy or that may literally crack under pressure. Stay away, also, from anything worth too much money to risk even the slightest chance of breaking.
The first place you should start looking is, of course, the kitchen. Open those drawers and look for an apple slicer–you know, those things that look like wagon wheels with handles? Just be very careful, as every “spoke” on this wagon wheel is a blade. If you have one of those new-fangled slicers for mangos, potatoes, or pineapples, they might work too, depending on their size.
Being very, very careful of the sharp side, flip one of the blades under the cap and, using a quick motion, snap the cap up. You’ll need this same motion with most of our recommended methods to open the bottle without a bottle opener.
Other items to try in the kitchen include a heavy-duty pot with a handle (you would wedge the bottle top in the handle and pull quickly, a potato masher (again, heavy duty), a drawer pull, etc.
Basically, you’re looking for something with a flat end that you can push under the bottle cap and pull up or out on to pop the cap off. So many things fall into this category: knives, forks, spoons–even a wooden spoon will work, if it has a flat end. Don’t forget that can openers also have a flip side for opening bottles!
The Office Is a Treasure Trove
If you’re drinking at home, don’t forget to look for potential bottle openers in your home office. If you’re drinking at work, finding a bottle opener is likely the least of your problems!
The first thing you should look for is a clipboard. If you find one, see if the clip’s hole is big enough to pop that bottle cap off.
If it isn’t, try instead to use the metal housing the spring apparatus, as it has many places where you can wedge the bottle to unseat the cap. Depending on their size, the handle of a basic pair of scissors may also do the trick.
Some more unique items I’ve seen used to pop open a beer bottle include a computer mouse, a laptop, and a CD or DVD. The DVD player in your computer or laptop might work too, but ours is just too flimsy and I’m pretty sure it would break before the cap yielded to the pressure. Another way to open a beer bottle is with a plastic magazine holder–if your office is that organized–but you need the kind with a cross-thatch holed pattern and not just smooth sides.
Some More Ways to Open a Beer Bottle
Believe it or not, a pen often makes a great substitute for a bottle opener. As with many of the items I mentioned, it’s most important that you hold the bottle in a firm grip with one hand. With the other hand, simply put the back of the pen under the cap and gently press up. You should hear the small sound the cap makes when the air seal is broken and then press up again to actually release the cap.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I’ve rarely seen such ingenuity as has resulted from the need to remove the one thing preventing a beer drinker from getting to his beer. This includes the back end of a lighter, a crowbar, a street sign, a counter, a credit card, an electric plug prong, and a car wheel. This definitely lends much credence to the idea that necessity is the mother of all inventions.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some brands of beer have easier caps to get off than others. Therefore, if you’ve watched the assorted YouTube videos and still can’t flick your bottle cap off the way they seem to do so easily, perhaps it’s time to change your preferred brand of beer. If you’re not ready or willing to do that, our best recommendation is that you go buy a few extra beer bottle openers.
