The Dreaded Bottling

Bottles are cool.  You can then give them to friends as gifts or share them.  But I've gotta go keg soon.  Bottles suck.  

So after your beer has sat for another week, activity has ceased, and your beer will have clarified a bit.  Its time to bottle.  First clean all your bottles.  This is the part for me that takes some time.  

This attachment shoots a jet of water into the bottles.

Let em dry upside down, and enjoy a beer!

With bottles you have to produce the carbonation in each bottle.  We do this by making a small amount of sugar water to give the yeast some more food.  They poop a little more and let off CO2 inside the bottle, and VOILA, carbonation when you crack that cap.

Don't remember what kind of sugar we use but its not table sugar.  Anyway, we heat it and 2 cups water to boiling, boil for a minute, than cool it to 80 degrees.

Then we pour it in a bucket and start siphoning the beer from our carboy into the bottling bucket.

Once in the bucket, we get our bottles ready and hook our filler to the end of the tube.  The filler has a small nipple at the end, when you press down inside the bottle, it releases beer.  Fill to the top and when you take out the filler, it gives it the perfect amount of headspace once capped.  

I work a 12 pack at a time, fill then bottle. For a total of 4 12 packs.

Anywhere from 1.5 to 2 weeks in the bottle.  This darker ale actually calls for 4 weeks, I'm going to be trying them in 3 and most of these will be coming with me for pre-trail refreshment with the Machines.

Tasted real good at bottling (sans carbonation), good flavor.  Final gravity measured at about 1.014 giving my  alcohol content a 6.1%.

Till uncapping! 8) 8)