Bottling of the beer

Last night we decided to go ahead and bottle our beer. It was pretty exciting to take the lid off our fermentation bucket.

Looks like an open septic tank, don’t you think? But, the smell was pure heaven which is the complete opposite of a septic tank.

We siphoned the beer out of the bucket into our bottling bucket taking care not to get too much of that sediment.

We now have a tube for our hydrometer so we could actually take a measurement of final gravity, but since we have no clue about our original gravity, we’re not exactly sure how much alcohol is in our beer. We were shooting for 4.6% so it shouldn’t be too far off that. I’m sorry this picture is for crap. There was so much junk on the counter (tubing, brushes, who knows what) and the better-half was doing something with the siphon so he was in the way too. I just hopped around hoping for a shot.

Our dishwasher has a sanitizing function so I sent 24 bottles through a cycle. Here are some cooling a bit before we bottled:

Then we bottled. I was in charge of filling the bottles–I kneeled on the kitchen floor for so long it was like Grandma getting up when we were done. The better-half used the capper and I think our bottles look pretty darn good. Notice our supervisor:

In everything I’ve read, you are supposed to taste your beer at this point so we took some out of the bottom of our bucket and drank some of what we put in our hydrometer flask. It had no carbonation, but it tasted pretty damn good. The carbonation will happen as the bottles sit for two more weeks. We made up a batch of priming sugar using this tool for guidance.

We’ve heard horror stories of bottles exploding during this portion of the process so the case of beer is sitting in the guest bathtub with a towel over the top. I’m sure we’ll be fine as I left a good amount of headroom in each bottle. But it’s our first time so we’re being cautious.

We’re going to duplicate this beer tomorrow afternoon and use our new glass carboy for fermentation. We’ll get to see what the beer is doing this time. The better-half will get bragging rights as brewer of that batch. We are very curious to taste the differences in the batches. The new batch will not have frozen yeast and we’ll be able to measure our gravities this time. We’ll see what a difference those two things make.