Posted: May 10th, 2008 | Author: Stacy | Filed under: Bottling Beer, Homebrew, Kolsch | No Comments »
After two weeks of fermentation, the kolsch was ready for bottling. Since lagering was optional and the temperatures in my garage right now are a little high to lager a beer well, I decided to just bottle it and call it good. We’ll see how it turns out! The malt extract got a little burned on the bottom of my brew pot, so there’s a slight burned sugar flavor in it right now. I’m really hoping that goes away.
Besides, I have a bigger problem: I’m out of bottles! My seven year beer bottle surplus has finally been depleted, which is totally amazing. I’ll have to start collecting bottles from friends.
Posted: February 26th, 2008 | Author: Stacy | Filed under: Bottling Beer, Grand Cru, Homebrew | 1 Comment »
I’m bustin’ my chops to get this beer bottled!Sometimes I feel like I live in an I Love Lucy episode. Or, like I live in that SNL Gilda Radner sketch where she plays
Lucy handling nuclear weapons.
I always obey the Joy of Home Brewing edict “relax, and have a homebrew” while bottling. So far, I’ve never made a skunky beer. I maintain that brewers are as superstitious as sailors, so I must have a homebrew while bottling to keep the mojo alive and ward off the bad bacteria that might ruin my beer. Since I already had a homebrew earlier (o! delicious brown ale), and am on a one beer a day ration, I had a cider. All the other ciders I’ve had from that batch have been very nicely carbonated, but this one decided to pull a Vesuvius on me and spray all over the counter and floor like a cheap sparkling wine. Fie!
Look at all those glorious bottles of beer!I had already siphoned the grand cru from the fermenting carboy into the bottling bucket, and when I went across the kitchen to start filling up bottles I noticed that the spigot on the bucket was leaking. Double fie! Hoist up 5 gallons of beer (good thing I’ve been going to the gym) and get Kathy to cram a kitchen towel under it to soak up the leaked beer, then BOTTLE LIKE MAD. I had all of the beer in bottles in about 20 minutes! I probably lost one beer to the leak, but that’s not so bad. And I’ve since tightened the spigot, so the next beer should bottle without a hitch. When I make Belgian style beers, I always like to use a special colored cap so I know exactly what’s what. Duvels are silver, and now Grand Crus are metallic red.
The good news is that the beer smells really good. Spicy, banana esters, cardamom notes, a little hint of honey. And the color will be great when it clears. It will condition in the bottle for at least a month before it’s ready to drink, but right now I think it’s going to challenge Celis White as my favorite wit/grand cru style.
Posted: February 1st, 2008 | Author: Stacy | Filed under: Bottling Beer, Homebrew, Stout | 1 Comment »
Red Baron Cappers rock!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!
