Homebrewing II - Bottling

If you're a faithful reader of my blog you will know that A few weeks ago, I got back into homebrewing. In the last post I wrote about my brew day. If you missed that one, you can check it out here. So, my fermenter full of wort has been sitting in the corner fermenting away for three weeks. The time has finally come to get that beer into bottles!

The last time I brewed, back in college, sanitization at the bottling stage was a major pain. I think part of the reason it has taken me so long to get back into brewing was the hard time I had during sanitization. Sanitization is vitally important to the craft of beer making. Any bacteria or contaminants introduced to the beer can introduce off flavors to the beer. And making sure everything is clean and sparkling can be a very painstaking process. Since I knew that I wasn't looking forward to sanitizing I went to Listermann's again to pick up some equipment to make my life a whole lot easier.

What you see in the photo above are my new favorite toys. My brand spanking new sulphiter and bottle tree. The sulphiter makes sanitizing the bottles a breeze. It sprays no rinse sanitizer (another necessity for reducing brewing headaches) up into the bottles, coating the insides. I then let them hang on the bottle tree and that's that. If you look at those bottles you'll notice another thing I've done to make this process go much much easier. The last time I brewed beer I used 12 oz. bottles, which with 5 gallons of beer, makes 48 bottles. This time around I picked up two cases of 22 oz bombers, effectively cutting my work in half.

At this point the beer has fermented completely. The yeast that I added has converted all of those fermentable sugars into alcohol and the carbon dioxide produced in the process has blown off. So the beer I have at this point is alcoholic, but it's also flat. In order to carbonate the beer I needed to add some priming sugar. The priming sugar gives the yeast a little bit more to chew on while the beer is in the bottle. It will produce a little bit more alcohol but more importantly, it will carbonate the beer. Once the priming sugar was in the bottling bucket it was time to rack the beer over from the fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket.

Adding the priming sugar.
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Racking the beer from the fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket.
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After I had gotten the beer and priming sugar into the bottling bucket it was time to put that beer into those freshly sanitized bottles. The bottling bucket has a spigot in the front that allows for a very easy bottling process. The bigger bottles also made this step in the process quite a bit easier as well. After the beer was in the bottles it was time to cap them. You can see me capping the bottles in the top picture for this post.

So now I'm sitting at home with two cases of home brewed smoked porter. The waiting game has begun. It'll take two weeks for the yeast to consume the priming sugar and carbonate the beer. Patience is certainly a virtue. 

Big time thanks must go out to both Meredith and Alex whose help during the brewing and bottling processes respectively was invaluable. Couldn't have done it without you!

Check back in a couple weeks to hear how it all turned out!

HD