I need crates that will maximise my potential beer bottle storage

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Milk crates work really well if you pick the right bottles. When I was bottling, I was using a mixture of Rogue and Sierra Nevada pint bottles in a milk crate. Alternate them and you will get a very neat fit of 16 pints per crate. You can easily stack them 5 high, so that's two batches in the footprint of one milk crate.
 
Been using the Bunnings small moving boxes, about $2 each, but they have a limited life and aren't a tight pack.
 
Not a box/crate but old steel filing cabinets work well. They hold a batch of longnecks in each drawer, if a bottle blows you don't get glass all over the place, if you have kids or un-trustable housemates they are lockable.
Good old secondhand ones are cheap as chips, up to 4 drawers go on gumtree for $20, they are also "tidy" and tend to reduce domestic conflict.
Mark
 
I have a nice lateral filing cabinet, and it is awesome. Along with Mark's points, you have easy access to all your brews without having to lift and rearrange milk crates, and you can easily see the caps, which is what most of us use for identification.

Just make sure you measure the draw depth. I lucked out and got one that I can put most Champaign bottles in, but there are some out there that will be too shallow to fit a longneck.

http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/81138-my-new-brauhaus-equipment/
 
I'm back off to the 2nd hand shop today. My height measurement was based on a certain brand of filing cabinet I've already got at home, maybe others will have slightly taller drawers. I'll be taking a sample bottle along to be sure.
 
Make sure you cap them, while not much, the cap adds the the height.
Also remember that longnecks come in different heights.
 
Scored two 4 draw cabinets. One has plenty of head space for the bottles to stand, the other will just scrape in perfectly with the weight of the filled bottles. All my bottles are Coopers so I'm safe with a consistent height.
Thinking if I should go to the trouble of painting them up nice, they're a bit rusty.
 
Got those important files stored away now. Not alphabetically though. $20 each, and fit over 24tall each drawer.
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