Bottling

The wait was finally over last Sunday, and we bottled the beer. It was a little nerve-racking to take the top off of the fermented and hope that there was beer inside, but there was indeed - delicious, aromatic, amber-colored beer.

The first step was to go back to the home brew shop and buy a bunch more equipment. Bottling bucket, bottles, bottle caps, siphon tubing, racking cane, bottling cane, bottle tree. I won't lie to you, the setup for this hasn't been cheap. Its put a deep, $200 dent in my pocketbook. But it was worth it the second I took my first deep whiff of the fruits of our labors. We took the lid of the fermenter and looked down into that gorgeous, delicious liquid and the two weeks of babysitting the swamp cooler, swapping out frozen water bottles twice a day, it all seemed very worth it.

We ended up getting 22oz. Bottles because that's all they had. At first I was bothered by this, but with home brew, there's always a little layer of yeast at the bottom of the bottle, and it's probably better to pour it out of the bottle to drink anyway, so I got over it.

We came home and washed and sanitized all the bottles and hung them on the nifty bottle tree until it was time to put the beer in them.




Then we had to move the beer from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket. The bottling bucket has a spigot on it which makes getting the beer out of the bucket much easier. So step one was to transfer the beer. Easy right? Just hoist that bucket up and pour it out? Nope, turns out that getting oxygen into your beer is, like, the worst thing you can possibly do to it. So, instead, you must use a siphon to gently, gently suck the beer out of one bucket and into the other. The last time I used a siphon, I was about twelve and cleaning out my fish tank. To get that siphon to work, I used to submerge the whole thing in the tank and then slowly work all the air bubbles out of it. Somehow I didn't think submerging a whole siphon plus my hands and arms into the fermented beer was going to work for this, so I had to YouTube "how to use a siphon". Looked pretty easy on the video, but try as I might, in our kitchen, I just couldn't get it flowing. Luckily, it turns out that Neil has been hiding his secret talent as a siphon-starter from me all these years. He's a pro! He just looked at the thing and it started flowing!

Inside the fermenting bucket, there is all sorts of crap stuck to the edge, where the yeast bubbled up during fermentation. And then at the bottom of the bucket is an inch thick layer of yeast and who knows what else. You don't want this in your beer, so you use a racking cane attached the siphon to get the beer out, and leave the yeast behind. The racking cane has a little cap on it that keeps the suction about an inch or so off the bottom of the bucket.









Once the beer was transferred from the fermented to the bottling bucket, we attached the bottling "Thingy" to the spigot on the bottling bucket. I'm sure there is a technical name for it, but I'm just too lazy to look it up right now. Basically it's got a spring in it that when you insert it into the bottle, and push down on the spring, it releases the beer into the bottle. When you let up on it, the flow of beer stops. It's actually super-awesome. We then proceeded to bottle. I filled up the bottles and Neil capped em.

















When we we finished, we had 24 22oz. bottles and three 12 oz. bottles. Now they sit on the shelf and condition for 3 weeks and then we drink!! it's really hard to wait and wonder what it is going to taste like, so...we didn't! We siphoned a little bit into a glass and tasted the fruits of our labor. Wit wasn't carbonated, because the carbonation happens in the bottles, so it tasted totally flat, but if you looked past that, it was really good! Good flavor, good body, I think it is going to be delicious. But, we still have to wait two more weeks to find out for sure.

Next up, we'll be brewing a clone of Obsidian Stout, which is one of my favorite stouts.





Look at that pretty!!