My bottling process.

First I look through my bottles to see if they need scrubbed out or if a simple rinsing will do. Most of the time all that's needed is a rinse since I rinse out my bottles as soon as I pour out the beer. Today I'm bottling two 5 gallon batches, so I got 4.5 cases of bottles ready.



I make sure to sanitize both my bottling bucket and the bottling wand and I run the sanitizer through the bottling wand into the bucket I store my Starsan in.



I use my dishwasher as a drainage rack/filling station. I make sure to sanitize the top rack before I start putting sanitized bottles onto it so they can drain.



I use a vinator filled with Starsan to sanitize the inside of my bottles. Three quick pumps and the inside of the bottle is thoroughly coated with Starsan.



Once I sanitize the bottles they go into the top of the dishwasher to drain.

I make sure to measure out the amount of dextrose I need and bring it to a boil with a few ounces of water.





I get the bottle caps ready and submerge them in Starsan until they're ready to go onto the bottles.



I also make sure to sanitize anything that will come in contact with the beer. That includes my mash paddle. I use this to mix the priming sugar with the beer. Some people will tell you there is no need to stir after racking your beer onto the priming sugar. I didn't use to, but I had problems with uneven carbonation. Stirring your beer gently is fine and shouldn't oxidize your beer as long as you don't splash. Once I added this step I no longer had uneven carbonation.



I place my bottling bucket slightly over the side of the counter so when I get to the last 8-10 beers I can tip it.

I place 10 sanitized and empty bottles on the open door of my dishwasher. This batch is a Newcastle clone so I wanted to bottle a six pack in Newcastle bottles



Once the bottles are on my dishwasher lid I fill one at a time and move my bottling wand to the next bottle once the current bottle is filled. When the next bottle is filling I pull a cap from the Starsan and cover the top of the filled bottle.



Once I get 10 bottles filled I use my capper to seal them.

Repeat until finished and clean up!

Here is how the Newcastle clone looks in it's bottles.



And here are all 98 bottles that I filled today.

Just a suggestion, take a look at the bottling sticky and you'll some great ideas to improve and speed up your process. There's a step or two that you might consider doing differently after you take a look at that post.

So would five gallons fit in 48 bottles?

I usually get around 49-52 bottles out of a 5 gallon batch.

Thanks! The search feature isn't working but I did read the sticky and there are conversions for different bottle sizes.

liquiditynerd said:

Thanks! The search feature isn't working but I did read the sticky and there are conversions for different bottle sizes.

Click to expand...

No worries!