GrapeHops Blog

Now, if you read the previous entry on brewing, we left off with the Wort in the fermenter, in the basement, bubbling a way, as little yeast monsters ate up the natural sugar and made your friend and mine, alcohol.

Well, two weeks went by and now we come to bottling time! We have to take all of that wort and get into our large-format (i.e., 22 ounces) bottles. While this isn’t as time consuming as the brewing (which takes about three hours from start to finish), it is a bit nerve-wracking because of all the sterilization that must take place (the key to brewing beer is the cleanliest of environment, and well, if you know me, you know how ironic that is).

Wort after two weeks

So we started out by sterilizing everything (not like in home canning where you boil the jars but by using a no-rinse sterilization agent and dunking the bottles into it).

Empty, sterelized bottles (those lying down need to drain still)

Next, put corn sugar in the bottom of the bottling bucket and siphoned the wort from the fermenting bucket to the bottling bucket. You want to do this with as little air exposure as possible to keep the beer from growing bacteria and skunking. Do not stir the wort in the bottling bucket (the pouring of the beer into the bottling bucket should churn the sugar enough to incorporate it into the wort.

Chris siphoning beer from fermenter to bottler

Siphoning beer into bottles

Capping

Once in the bottling bucket, you siphon the beer into the beer bottles and then put the cap on (this is the only part of the process where it really does help having two people working as a team).

That’s it – store the bottles for at least two weeks (to get the carbonation going) and then you can enjoy (though apparently the longer you let it sit, the better). From our five gallons we got 24 22-oz bottles of beer (you do the math).

Now the question I have is to label or not? I think labels would look cool but do they stay on and can we get them off, when we want to reuse these bottles in the future for another batch?

Bottled Beer