Yet another act taking place in a Chicagoland apartment.
A week and a half after the yeast cake discovery during the transfer from primary to secondary fermentation it was time for Toby and Casey to bottle their beer. The first step once again is to santatize everything used.
However, before bottling can happen you have to acquire bottles. Let's brainstorm some ways in which you can acquire bottles:
- drinking bottled beer=recycle your bottles
- asking friends to save the bottles they drink=more recycling
- buy bottles $12 for 24=no recycling and wasting money
- digging through trash cans to find bottles=gross but recycling
- asking random strangers at the local pub for their empty bottles=recycling and Toby and Caseys' favorite way to acquire bottles
- asking local pub to just save their unused bottles and make a commitment to pick them up on certain days at certain times=recycling however pubs like to say 'no' to this request
Once you have acquired the bottles you might want to wash and de-label them. The best way to do that is to purchase some oxyclean and soak the bottles in a warm bath of it. The oxyclean can last for several of batches of bottles so don't be afraid to reuse it. After de-labeling you can do one of two things 1) you can rinse them in a bath of warm water again 2) you can run them through a hot rinse cycle in your dish washer just make sure there is no dish soap added (that can really mess up your beer).
Now that your bottles (anywhere between 50-55 for a 5 gallon batch) are de-labeled and rinsed it's time to bottle. This process begins just like when you transfer from primary to secondary. Using your siphoning tools you will siphon the beer into the bottling bucket (once again make sure your bottling nozzle is attached). Be careful not to touch the bottom because there could be a cake of yeast and you wouldn't want that ending up in your bottles. Before the siphoning begins make sure to add your starter sugars. The best process for this is to add the 1 part sugar to 2 part water and heat in the microwave until you see boiling. This will sterilize the sugar and make it a liquid so that it is better dispersed throughout the beer. Now siphon the beer into the bucket with the starter sugar solution on the bottom. Last time Toby noticed the way the yeast coalesced was rather lumpy verses a flat cake at the bottom of the bucket. This time the couple kept payed close attention to the yeast to see if any changes occurred. They found that instead of a yeast cake they had almost no yeast grown at the bottom of the bucket. The reasoning for this is most likely due to the lack of aeration (which was intentional for this specific beer).
Now that the beer is in the bottling bucket they could detach the siphon and attach one end of the siphoning tube to the bottling wand and the other to the bottling nozzle. This part goes quickest with two people. One person (Casey) will fill the bottles the other person (Toby) will cap the bottles. This process is normally very monotonous but once you get through it you're basically done. For Toby and Casey this process got frustrating quickly. They found that they had a funky bottling wand that liked to stick so beer sprayed everywhere. The floors got really sticky really fast and they lost a couple bottles worth of beer due to the wand. They had to buy a new wand for next time which was only a couple of bucks fortunately.
The last step is always to clean up. This was quite the clean up due to the spraying of beer everywhere. The floors were sticky making the bottoms of the bottles sticky so clean up took a bit longer than normal. All the equipment was clean and the bottles were filled and now it was time to hide them in a dark corner for 10 days. Unfortunately, this is the hardest part of the process. Having the will power to allow the bottles to just sit. Toby always ends up opening them to taste days in advanced and Casey enjoys drinking them when they are young so this makes for a good team.
This concludes the bottling adventure. Stay tuned for 10-15 days from now when the final taste test has been taken.
No comments:
Post a Comment