Sunday, November 11, 2007

It's in the Bottle

The beer that been fermenting away in our basement as documented here, finally was bottled and hopefully should be ready for consumption when the daughters return for Thanksgiving. I have no idea how it will turn out or whether it will be drinkable at all. I should try a bottle to see if its carbonating, but I suspect I'll just wait and find out on Turkey Day.

After fermenting away for two weeks in the basement, we dragged the carboy back up to the kitchen. With 5 gallons of beer inside, its quite heavy not to mention awkward to try and carry up the stairs. Good thing I have a young strong helper.

One of the things I learned in this whole beer making process is how clean and sanitary everything needs to be. Not necessarily because there's any danger in drinking it, but the wrong bacteria could lead to some bad tasting beer. So clean we did. Here we are sanitising the bottling bucket.


The it was on to brushing and cleaning out the bottles and bottle caps. It was all pretty messy.

After getting things all clean and sparkling, we siphoned the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket. This took a while. While the beer was transferring, I put some in a glass for a taste. It actually tasted pretty good considering its flat beer at this point. Hopefully the finished product will taste even better once its carbonated.


After siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket, we decided we were hungry and left to go eat pizza. I covered the beer with some Glad Wrap.


The bottles clean and ready to be filled.


Filling our first bottle. Using the bottle filler turned out to be a pain because the tubing kept slipping off it. Eventually we filled the bottles from the tubing directly and didn't use the bottle filler. That worked out well although we still got beer all over. Considering we just had the kitchen floor cleaned the day before made Ann doubt the usefulness of this new hobby.


We ended up bottling 55 bottles of beer. Here is the first case. Our German Quality Inspector checks it out.


We'll see how things turn out and I'll let you know in about a week and a half.

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