Bottling Day: Shorthorse Oatmeal Stout - A Small Disaster

To view this blog post with pictures, follow this link.
This is the third time I've bottled my beer, and I'm still kind of terrible at it. I guess it wasn't really a disaster, just a wet, sticky mess, and I'm worried that the beer won't turn out very good because of all the splashing and exposure to oxygen. Optimistically speaking, I suppose the best thing about making mistakes is learning not to repeat them. Here's what happened: the problem with bottling yesterday occurred when trying to siphon the beer, gently, with no sediment, into the bucket. That doesn't sound too difficult, right? And I bought an ingenious tool called an auto-siphon, that should've made this process extremely simple.


You were supposed to solve all my problems!


The auto-siphon would connect with a tube and allow me to transfer the beer without disturbing the trub (sludgy dead yeast and hop residue sitting on the bottom of the carboy.) The difficulty was that the carboy was too tall, with too narrow an opening for the auto-siphon to reach below a certain point, maybe two gallons or so from the bottom. I don't think I'd have this problem if my fermentor was a bucket instead of a carboy - noted for next time.


beer at the bottom is hard to reach


The beer needs to be bottled or kegged, in order for the yeast to create carbon dioxide and carbonate the beer. Nobody likes flat beer. I don't have a kegging set up (yet, but someday, right honey?) and I really love the aesthetic of beer in a bottle. I usually use plain white corn sugar for this, but according to How To Brew, by John Palmer, brown sugar has the same degree of fermentability, and can be easily substituted.


Brown sugar, to go with the oatmeal!



I could just pour the priming sugar straight into the carboy, mix it up a little, and pour straight from there into the bottles. But it would be hard to evenly distribute the sugar that way, and each bottle would have different amounts of sugar, thus different amounts of carbonation. Also, the bottling bucket has a spigot, and that makes filling forty or so bottles a whole magnitude easier.

All was proceeding well at first, the auto-siphon squirted the beer through the tube into the bottling bucket with the added priming sugar and water solution.



When air started coming through the tubes, I realized the auto-siphon wasn't able to reach any lower into the carboy, and we had a problem. I tried using the water-starter siphoning trick, but I couldn't get the beer to flow through at a high enough pressure to keep going. This is when the floor started getting splashed with beer and water at regular intervals. No wonder kitchens aren't carpeted. Eventually, with about two gallons of beer left in the carboy, we decided to pour it as gently as possible into the bucket.



We stopped this manual pouring method when there was about a gallon left, since there was just too much sediment about to flow in, and we got to bottling what we had.


Wife: "Are those my yearbooks?" Me: "Uhh, maybe?"


Because of my mistakes, this was a low yield batch. We capped about 12 22oz and 24 12 oz bottles. Since I couldn't bear to waste that last gallon, we poured it in the bottling bucket, sediment and all, and bottled that as well. I realized too late that there was not much sugar left in the few ounces of beer in the bucket when we added the last gallon, so the final three 22oz bottles may not get very carbonated. If so, I can spoon in a bit of sugar individually. But they're just experimental anyway, since they have a lot of sediment in them.



Live and learn, and have a beer. Thanks for your help, Capper.