Saturday, March 21, 2009

Bottled the beer


After several weeks of letting the beer ferment on its own--a few weeks longer than we originally intended--we bottled our beer today.

Over the last few weeks, we have added to our collection of dark brown bottles--we found that Pacifico bottles are incredibly easy to clean. The label comes of nicely and the glue scrubs away after just 5-10 minutes of soaking in a solution of Oxyclean in the kitchen sink. In the end, we collected 43 bottles, which turned out to be the perfect number (good estimating eyes!). First thing this morning, I put all the bottles I could fit, 37, into the dishwasher and ran it to give them all a final cleaning. Darren gave a final wash to the others by hand.

We took the fermenting bucket and filled it 3/4 full of water and added a full tablespoon of iodofor. We soaked all of the bottling equipment in it, and soaked each bottle fully for several minutes. This turned out to be quite time consuming, but well worth the effort since we want to brew beer, not bacteria.

Once all was clean, we emptied and rinsed the fermenting bucket and put it on the ground for siphoning. We put the glass carboy up on the counter, and filled the (already-clean) siphoning tubes with water. We then put the tube into the middle of the carboy, let the water drain into a bowl, and then let the rest release into the bucket. We were able to avoid about two inches of yeasty, hoppy sediment at the bottom of the carboy this way.

We then attached the siphon-tubing to the spigot on the fermenter bucket, and began the (satisfying, yet tedious) process of filling the beer bottles with beer. I did filling, and Darren did the capping. It was a bit nerve-racking to watch him, since he had to put so much pressure to get the capping mechanism to go down. I was afraid that one of the bottles would explode in a tragic mess of glass and beer. (By the way, the beer smelled amazing at this point--so far so good for being clean in the whole process). All in all though, the whole process went smoothly, and now the bottles are all sitting, carbonating, in our Harry Potter closet. The taste test of the beer was successful as well. Mmmmmm.

While Darren cleaned up in the kitchen, I took the carboy out on to the patio and cycled water, soap, and a scrubber through it. After two trips to the kitchen sink I had emptied out almost all of the yeasty material from the carboy. I gave it one last scrub with soap outside, and then flushed water through until it was rinsed clean. I gave it one final fill with a bit of chlorine bleach to make sure that it doesn't get musty while it waits in the closet until the next brew.

I realized after all this, that since it takes most of a day anyway, it might not be a bad idea to make it a full day and start a new batch of beer after bottling the old beer. We have a sanitary kitchen at this point, all of the cleaning equipment out, and a freshly cleaned carboy. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to add a few hours to get a new batch of beer brewing. Maybe when we order new brewing ingredients in the near future--we still have yet to decide what kind to brew--we'll order two sets of ingredients. :) We're going to make an efficient enterprise of this.

And we gave the brew kittens a lesson in cleanliness too. I'm sure they'll thank us later.

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