Irish Stout bottled!

Posted: February 1st, 2008 | Author: Stacy | Filed under: Bottling Beer, Homebrew, Stout | 1 Comment »

Megan and I bottled the Irish Stout last night after it fermented for 10 days. Now it will spend at least two weeks conditioning and carbonating the bottle before it’s ready to drink… which, of course, I won’t be doing! But it sure smelled good last night, quite caramely and chocolatey. Kathy reports that it has a coffee note to it and I hope that doesn’t disappear with conditioning.

Rather than buy new bottles, I save all the bottles from beer and cider that I drink and use those for bottling. You can’t use screw-top bottles, so I tend to avoid buying beers from breweries that use that kind of bottle. It’s super easy to clean bottles in the dishwasher, which saves time and a lot of annoying knee pain as you kneel over the bathtub full of bottles trying to clean and sanitize them. The dishwasher takes care of cleaning and sanitizing, plus it loosens or removes most of the labels. I can fit around 60 bottles into the bottom rack of my dishwasher, which is plenty for 5 gallons of beer.

Bottling beer is pretty simple. I transfer the beer from the carboy to a plastic bottling bucket. It’s a big 8 gallon bucket with a spigot at the bottom that makes it really easy to pour beer right into individual bottles. Some folks siphon beer directly into bottles using a plastic tube, and I feel very sorry for them. Once upon a time, I had to siphon beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket using a length of food-grade tubing which always lead to mess and misery.

Then I found the magical wine thief! What a time saver. Just prime it a couple of times and it sucks the beer from the fermenter to the bucket with ease! Plus it means I get a lot more beer and far less sediment in the bucket. Usually, a wine thief is just an outer plastic column with a rubber gasket attached to a pipette on the inside, so you pull on the pipette to get a vacuum going and suck up some of the fluid. I’ve attached a food-grade tube to my pipette so I can just prime the tube and let the beer run freely to the bottling bucket.

Capping the bottles is really easy. I use a Red Baron capper, which has a handy magnet that helps keep the cap in place while you depress the handles and secure the cap. I like to choose interesting caps so I can tell the beers apart.

And that’s pretty much it for bottling beer!

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