• Back to Part I: Beer Making – The Learning-ing
• Back to Part II: Beer Making – Stuff Acquired, Recipe Planned
• Back to Part III: Beer Making – The Plan
• Back to Part IV: Beer Making – Making Beer
• Back to Part V: Beer Making – Racking

All the bottles, all lined up

O bottling day! Callooh! Callay!

Now that the beer has had ample time to ferment and age, it’s time to prime it with a little more sugar (which the remaining yeast will turn into CO2 for carbonation) and bottle it.

I was going to use honey as a priming sugar in hopes it might add a little flavour, but after some reading on homebrew forums that it is unlikely to impart any noticeable flavour, I opted to just use white cane sugar instead. The math (yep, more math) told me I should be using about 2.11oz (60g) for the amount of beer to be aged and stored in my cold storage room.

Priming sugar

The sugar was mixed into about 2 cups of boiling water, cooled, and poured into a food-grade plastic bucket. The beer was then siphoned out of the carboy and into the bucket – this was all being done carefully to not splash introduce too much oxygen at this point in the process.

Beer transfer

Of course, as with every other step in the beermaking process, everything must be clean and sanitized, the bottles are no exception.

Washing

I washed the two dozen 16oz EZ-Cap reusable cap bottles I had bought, plus four previously used 1L recappable bottles to use.

Drying

Now begins the filling process. I used the same siphon, along with a bottling valve (ridiculously helpful by the way) to fill each of the bottles.

Bottle filling!

I filled all of the above 16oz bottles with about one inch of headspace from the top, and a little more than that for the larger reused bottles. I quickly realized that I did not have enough bottles, and had to quickly wash and sanitize four more 1L bottles to fit the rest!

I think next time I will make smaller batches of beer.

I had a quick sample of some of what was left over after all the bottles were filled. It’s a little difficult to judge flat, room-temperature beer, but based on what I could taste I think I did pretty ok! No real off-flavours that I could tell, which was my biggest concern.

Now they sit in my cold storage room, carbonating and aging at least a couple more weeks. I think I’m going to have to throw a homebrew party to make all of this beer disappear…