The Scotch Is In The Bottle

Well the Scotch Ale is anyway. I spent yesterday afternoon bottling up the ale that has been fermenting away down in the laundry room for the past two weeks. It always amazes me how long it takes me to bottle two cases of beer. Like 3 1/2 hours. Granted most of that time isn't spent doing the actual bottling. Actually most of that time is spent cleaning and sanitizing the equipment and bottles prior to bottling and cleaning up afterward. Lets begin. This is the parts of the bottle tree being sanitised. Two minutes and no rising!

More cleaning and sanitising. Here it's the bottles being sanitised and hung out to dry. I do about 54 bottles. Note the paper towels around the bottle tree. Bottling beer is a very messy business. The paper towels also kept sticking to my sneakers and I would drag them around like some dofus trailing toilet paper coming out of the bathroom.

Right prior to bottling the beer, I prepare the priming sugar. You boil the sugar in a pint of water. The sugar will carbonate the beer.


Here I am siphoning the beer from the fermentor into the bottling bucket. Turns out I used the wrong size tubing for the siphoning and I had to keep priming the siphon. I'm glad I combed my hair for the picture. I transferred about five gallons of ale into the bottling bucket.

Ann helped me bottle the beer. She filled the bottles while I capped them. Somehow we forgot how we bottled from last time and made one heck of a mess what with overfilling bottle after bottle. As I said, it was messy business. I ended up bottling about 52 bottles. I broke one so ended up with 51 bottles. The beer should be ready in about two weeks. I'm sure we'll enjoy it with the family over the Christmas holidays. The finished product, bottled and packed.