my life, my thoughts, my world.

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.

Sometimes you run into a situation where you a) have very little space, and b) need very soft and even light. If you happen to have two lights, you can make your life very simple. Again this wonderful tidbit originated (for me anyway) with the Strobist blog, but I’ll share it again just in case you’re scared to dive into things there.

The short and skinny is simple. Get two light stands, and two shoot through umbrellas. Raise one of the umbrellas up high and angle it down towards your subjects. Make the bottom of that umbrellas a few inches above where the top of your lens will be. Take your bottom umbrella and put it under the top umbrella, leaving maybe a foot or two of free space, and angle it up some. To do this you’ll need to have the legs on one stand flat and wide, and the other raised up and narrow. Weighing down the top stand is wise if there’s going to be any potential for wind, or people moving about the area. Set your exposure as you normally would, leaving both lights at the same power will give you what almost looks like a giant light bank. You can mess with lighting ratios a bit for a more three dimensional effect, I usually just shoot both strobes at the same power.

The setup looks something like this:

Stack your umbrellas

The result looks a little like this:

Clamshell Lighting Result

For the benefit of anyone interested in off-camera lighting, but hesitant to dive into the greatness that is Strobist.com, I have taken a few photos to demonstrate very basic lighting in both a three light, and single light setup. Setting these shots up took less than 5 minutes, and can be done literally anywhere. If you are a photographer and you want to offer more, for less, I would strongly advise buying at least one of the wireless Strobist kits available at Midwest Photo Exchange.

This is straight out of the camera, and while the background is not completely white throughout, fixing the right edge is trivial at best. Even a tighter crop would fix the “problem” in an instant.

I'll break down this photo in this post.

The background:

First thing first, if you have access to a white (or grey) wall, you can do almost anything. Firing a strobe into said wall will give you a perfect background for headshots, and just about anything else. You can also gel the strobe for different color backgrounds, or do the same later in post. I like taking whichever approach requires the least work after the fact, so I go for gels whenever possible.

Strobe + Wall = Background!

Popping light into the background can also help add texture and help your subject pop out. In a single light situation, I am generally always inclined to use that light on a background surface for a different dynamic. Sure, you could bounce into the ceiling for a nice soft light – but that is not very exciting. Sometimes it is totally appropriate, but sometimes it just is not even possible (think of a black ceiling – your bouncing will not do much there). Examples of both techniques below.

Single light, into the background.

Single strobe, bounced into the ceiling.

Lighting the subject:

Back to the insta-studio setup. Once you have the background situated, you will need to get some light onto your subject. One of the easiest, and fastest solutions is to put two light sources at 45˚ to your subject’s left and right, and have one be providing about twice as much light as the other. You can get far more specific, but where lighting ratios are concerned, that will get you in the ball park.

If you are cramped for space, as is often the case, use a shoot-through umbrella for the main light and bounce into an umbrella for fill. The stands will be in roughly the same position, but the fill umbrella ends up roughly twice as far away as the main light. I do this often to keep both 285HVs at the same (and usually lowest) power setting so my refresh times are the same for both lights. If you are shooting AC monolights, this is not nearly as much of a problem.

Umbrellas setup as described above.

Now all of that is easy to see in the setup shot, but for some (myself included) it helps to see exactly what each light is doing. Pay attention to the captions below (series shot at ISO 200, f8, 1/200s):

No lights firing

Background light only - note that some fill has spilled in as it bounced back off the umbrellas

Main and Background Light

Fill and Background Light

Main and Fill Light

You have seen this already. All three lights firing.

That is about all there is to it. If you seek more information, I will again direct you to Strobist.com because there is far more information there. This is just the tip of the iceberg. When you dive below the surface, you will come to love light. You will also start to see everything in a different way. Pretty cool!