1st Beer Bottling

See the brewing process here.

After fermenting a home brew for two week, I had the next task, bottling the beer.

I've accumulated empty bottles over the years, but only 24 or so. I don't have some giant horde! Of course, the labels would be wrong if I didn't remove them. After looking around online, I tried soaking them in water and dish soap for about 24 hours.

I had to fill them to keep the bottles from floating!

That did not work too well. I had to do a lot of scrubbing afterward. The bottles eventually were clean and ready for bottling day. I had a bunch of other stuff from the brewing kit.

More tools of the trade

The first part for bottling is putting the fermentor in a high location, like the edge of a sink or table. I had pre-planned for this, so the fermentor was already on the table in the laundry room. I just had to move it to the edge so I could attach the hose and bottle filler. The hose is a tight fit around the end of the bottle filler, so I had to soak it in hot water for a minute to make it expand. Even so, getting it on the filler required some effort. At least it makes a good seal.

Close up of the house/filler connection

I made another batch of sanitizing solution, then soaked the bottles and caps in the solution, setting them up to dry. Drying bottles upside down is a challenge, so I used a box in the rack to keep them from falling over.

Bottles went one at a time

All the caps went together

Drying bottles upside down is tricky!

Caps are easy

I sanitized the bottle filler and hose. Then I put the other end of the hose on the spigot (which required another hot water immersion to make it slightly larger) and then dispensed some beer through it to clean out any of the sanitizing solution still in the hose and filler.

Heating the other end of the hose

On the spigot

In order to carbonate the beer, it needs another round of sugar for the yeast to consume. So little tablets went into each bottle before filling. Out of the ten more or less identical bottles I used, two had trouble swallowing their tablets. I am pretty sure it was the tablets' fault since they had melded together a little bit (another side effect of waiting too long to use the kit). Some industrious jabs with a pointy item made the tablets go all the way inside.

Give me some sugar, baby!

Filling the bottles was fairly easy. Just stick the bottle filler in the bottle and let gravity drop the uncarbonated beer into the bottle. Filling the bottle all the way to the top left a small amount of air once I took out the filler. Then a cap sat on top and the next bottle got filled. Out of the ten bottles, only the last one came up a bit short, about two-thirds full when the fermentor ran out of liquid. So one bottle will be very fizzy or very potent? I will find out in two weeks when the carbonating is done.

Gravity does the work

A little space left over after taking the filler out of the bottle

The capping gizmo was very easy to use. The one from the kit even has a magnet in the middle to hold the cap in place!

Sealing the bottles

I stored the bottles in a box on a shelf in the basement to maintain the 65 to 75 degree temperature. Then I cleaned up all the other supplies in hopes of using them again soon...as soon as I see how this batch turns out.

Sanitized bits (except for the bottle capper)

The fermentor required a little work to get clean

Now the two-week wait...

The bottling process was about two hours with some down time while items were drying from the sanitizing solution. You definitely do not want to serve santizer-flavored beer to your friends. Or yourself!