January 8, 2010, I blogged about the start of my first home-brew experience. Today, I continue that tale with the bottling of my very first home-brewed beer. I had intended to wait longer in fermentation, but another hydrometer reading today showed no change from my last reading several days go. Time to bottle.
Since I will ultimately move up to larger 5gal batches, I decided to make another trip to DeFalco’s for a few more odds and ends. While I already had Iodophor for sanitizing my equipment, I did not yet have any way to dry my bottles after cleaning and sanitizing. I also lacked any way to really get a smooth, and controlled, flow of beer into my bottles to avoid aeration. In my last post, I really had no concept of how important any of that is to the final product. Fortunately, I spent about 10 hours in my truck driving across Texas and listening to Brew Strong podcasts. It all makes much more sense now. A bottling bucket, a bottle filler with some tubing, and a bottle tree came home with me.
Bottle capper and sanitized bottles
When I finally got home, it was time to clean and sanitize my equipment and working area. I would hate to make it this far only to infect my beer and have wasted my time. Iodophor should be used at a concentration of 12.5ppm for rinse-free sanitization. That translates to .50 fl. oz. per 5gal of water. Since I do not have much to sanitize, and did not feel like wasting that much solution, I made 2.5gal of solution to sanitize my bottles, the bottle tree, my caps, bottle brush, bottling bucket, bottle filler and hose. About a quart of the solution went into a cleaned and sanitized spray bottle so I could sanitize the outer surfaces of everything as well as the inner surfaces.
Once all of that was done, I made my priming solution. For a 5gal batch I would boil .75 cups of dextrose in 2 cups of water. I cut this in half for my 2.5gal batch, and added it to my sanitized bottling bucket. It was finally time to pour my beer into the bottling bucket, on top of my priming solution. This is when I wished I had gone ahead and purchased a racking cane and siphoning tube. Pouring, with any kind of control, 2.5gal of beer through the mostly useless tap on the front of a Mr. Beer brew-keg was an exercise in patience to say the least. It took forever, and exposed my beer to more air than I would have liked. Now I know. I will use a racking cane next time, for sure.
the bottom of the fermenter
The Beer
Bottling Bucket with my beer inside
My first beer, bottled.
Bottling went quite smoothly. My batch filled 16 12oz glass bottles, plus half another 12oz bottle and two ~33oz plastic bottles. I had my Dad tilt the bottling bucket towards the valve for me so I could get most of the beer out. In the end, only about half a pint was left behind. I can live with that. In a few days, I will check the two plastic bottles and see if they have hardened from carbonation at all. If I managed to make it through this whole process without screwing something up, I will be quite happy. Doubly so if the beer is drinkable.
