Ahhh, Bottling Day

The brewing, fermentation, and aging are complete. All that's left to do now is bottle the tasty brew. This is probably the most labor-intensive step of the entire beer-making process, but unless you keg your beer, you can't drink it without bottling it.

The first step, and you may actually want to do this one before bottling day, is to be sure you have enough bottles. Usually, I try to have between 48 and 52 bottles that are not twist offs. Often, some of these bottles are from commercially available beers, so I remove the labels. This can usually be done with a 45 minute soak in some warm water and a little bit of elbow grease.

Next, you need to sanitize all those bottles. I use the drying cycle on my diswasher, but you can also santize with a quick soak in some bleach water. If you do use this method, just be sure to thoroughly rinse your bottles and check to be sure you cannot smell any bleach in them before you fill the bottles with your beer.

After the bottles have been sanitized, and while you are waiting for them to cool, I siphoned the beer out of the secondary and into the bottling bucket. I also mixed in about 5 ounces of corn sugar to carbonate the beer in the bottles. This sugar allows the yeast that is still in the beer to have some consumable sugar. The by-product of the yeast consuming this sugar is carbon dioxide- which creates the carbonation in the beer.

After the siphoning is complete, simply fill your bottles from the bottling bucket with a bottling wand, cap, and move to a quiet place for about 10-14 days of conditioning. During this time, the beer will clarify even more and the carbonation will develop in the bottle.

Into the Secondary

Well, I racked my IPA into the secondary this evening. This is my first attempt at this style of beer and it's my own recipe. The beer wasn't fully fermented, but I already had a specific gravity reading of about 1.044 for an expected abv of about 5.2%, and I wanted to get the beer off the sediment on the bottom of the fermenter.

Here it is right after the transfer:

It's a little darker than I thought it would be, but it should clear up after a week or so in secondary and another couple of weeks conditioning in the bottle.

This is also my first attempt at dry hopping. That's what the "pond scum" looking stuff floating on top is- 1.5 ounces of Sarachi Ace hops.

And finally, the beer has been moved into the cellar.

OK, it's really the bathtub in our second bathroom but it works and the beer doesn't seem to mind.