So last night I decided to bottle my first brew. I started this batch on April 5th and so it was fermenting for 25 days. 12 days in primary and 13 days in secondary. Here's a rundown of what I did and in what order (with notes on where I would do things differently the second time):
-sterlized my equipment with no-rinse
-cleaned 12 bottles at a time, first rinsing under tap water, draining, and then filling with no-rinse. After those 12 filled bottles had sat for 10-15 minutes I'd pour the contents of them into the next 12 bottles. Rinse and repeat.
-Once I had a full case of cleaned empty bottles I put them back into the case open mouth up. I carried these into the basement and set them aside.
-Next I boiled a cup of water and added the priming sugar (3/4cup dextrose). Stirred that with a spoon (also sterlized) until it was dissolved and carried it to the basement. I actually reheated the sugar for 20 seconds to make sure it was near boiling.
-I put my bottling bucket below the secondary, secondary is on a table (here's a tip, the bottling bucket's spigot is lower than the base of the bucket, this screwed me up because I was left holding tubing and the autosiphon while I tried to search for a large sturdy lid/board to keep the bucket off the ground. I ended up using the chair I was sitting on which was close to the same height as the secondary and so it took much longer to drain from the secondary to the bottling bucket than I had hoped.)
-I now primed the autosiphon and slowly began to drain the secondary, keeping sure to have the mouth of the autosiphon near the surface at all times (to prevent sucking sediment up from the bottom). As the level of beer went down, I slowly moved the autosiphon down as well to keep it 1" below the surface.
-After about 1/2 gallon of beer was transferred I gently poured the liquid priming sugar into the bottling bucket. If I was to do this again I would probably wait until 2-3 gallons were in the bucket just so I got slightly better mixing, but this is not a big deal.
-I wanted to take the siphon down pretty low but didn't want to risk sucking up crud so when I stopped there was exactly 1 pint left in the secondary (I know because I poured it into a pint glass and it was up to the brim). I drank 1/2 of this but that's for later in the post.
-I now replaced the secondary with the bottling bucket. The bottling bucket is about waist-high and so I was going to be bottling near the ground. I sterlized the end of my tubing that was free in the bottling bucket, and connected the bottle filler (this thing is absolutely needed for filling without a headache). This is probably why I'll go back to the LHBS and get a closed plug instead of the spigot as I found using the autosiphon with tubing instead of the spigot easier to control the flow.
-Go get a beer. No I mean it, go get a beer. I realized I had no idea where to fill the bottles too, and so my wife grabbed me one of her Bicardi Silver bottles so I could use that as a guide. This is probably only needed for the first 1 or 2, but it was nice to know about where I should be filling too. Other thing to remember is the bottle filler displaces about 1/2" of liquid once you start to fill the neck. So you need to fill to within 1/2" of the top so that when you take the filler out, the level drops back down to where that beer you got is (don't drink this beer until you can remember the level!
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-While you're getting the beer also get an old towel or bucket. The bottle filler tends to slowly drip when not filling and after 2 cases of beer will have made a sticky puddle under the bucket. I just put the sterlized container that held all the equipment underneath the bottling bucket to catch the drips between bottles.
-Before filling I used the autosiphon to gently stir the beer in the bottling bucket to distribute the sugar better. Because of how slow my transfer was I was concerned the sugar was probably not evenly spread out in the beer (ie bottle bombs and flat beers would be in my future). I had sterlized a large spoon for stirring but never used it because of the autosiphon.
-Now it was time for the scary part. I grabbed the first bottle and turned it upside down in a small bowl to catch any extra no-rinse that didn't drain the first time (this was my insurance policy against contamination while I was making the sugar/racking to bottling bucket.
-I lowered the sterlized bottle filler into the bottle, raised the bottle to slightly higher than the bottom of the bucket, and pushed it down. As the beer started to go into the bottle I slowly lowered the bottle which increased the flow rate. This is done to allow for faster filling without risking aeration. Once you do 5-10 you'll get a good feel for how fast and how high you have to start holding the bottle to get a very gentle beer layer in the bottle. By the end I think I was filling a bottle every 20 seconds or so. Probably could have gone faster, but I was doing other things at the same time.
-After I did 3 bottles, I would place caps on the tops (caps were taken directly from the bag and not sterlized). About 1/2 way through the first case I realized there was a lot of waiting and watching and so I decided to multitask
. I was holding the bottle in my right hand and the autosiphon in my left. I found that I could start the bottle filling and then hold the bottle in my left hand (just let the siphon sit in the bottle, it will continue to fill). Now with my right hand free, I would first grab a cap and place it on the bottle just filled, and after that was done, grab a new bottle, up end it to drain the no-rinse, and about this time the bottle filling was done. This sped up the filling tremendously and as long as you are always watching the level of the beer in the bottle being filled you won't have any problems. I actually didn't mess this part up.
-After I had filled a case of beer and laid the caps on I proceeded to cap these. What I did was put a new bottle on the table next to the bottling bucket and put the bottle filler inside. I put a book underneath the bottle and filled it about 1/2 way full (to give it weight). As long as the level is even with the liquid in the bucket no more beer will go into the bottle. A safer way would be to clamp the tubing if using my setup or just closing the spigot if using that. Mine worked fine.
-I grabbed the first bottle with the cap laying on top. After doing this for 1/2 a case I realize with the particular capper I have (the 2 handed one you put around the bottle and bring your hands down, kind of like a piece of exercise equipment) its actually better to do it this way than put the cap on the magnet and then lower it onto the bottle. I might actually remove the magnet because every once in a while if I wasn't perfectly centered it would pick up the cap and I'd have to reposition.
-I put the capper on the cap and pushed down. It was difficult to judge the force at first, only after doing a bunch did I find out it works best if you push inwards instead of down. I know this is difficult to picture but think of it like squishing an orange between your hands instead of having the orange on the ground and squashing it. If you use the capper pushing inward instead of down you get a nice seal without the circle mark on top that may (probably not) affect the seal.
-Overall the capping went without a hitch. I did the case in probably 5 minutes or so, no breaks, no spills, etc.
-I checked my bottle filler (hadn't changed level), and went back upstairs to drain the other case of bottles.
-I then proceeded to do exactly the same thing with the filling and capping.
-As the level got lower I propped up one side of the bottling bucket to make sure the autosiphon never ran dry. I kid you not, by the time the autosiphon went dry there was not more than a shot of beer in the bottom. This is the main reason why I feel the autosiphon is superior to the spigot on the bottling bucket. The spigot is an inch or so above the bottom of the bucket and so unless you are using this as your secondary and need to keep the sediment out, you'd probably have a lot of beer left over in the bottom.
-So I finished capping the last bottle and then counted. I knew I was going to be short a LONG time ago, but it turns out I was probably almost a gallon short. Some of this was from losses during transfer from primary to secondary to bottling bucket, but still I was short. I was 7 beers shy of a full 2 cases, so we'll see how that effects the beer and carbonation.
-I then took everything out back and hosed it off well. I didn't clean with anything, just water for now.
Hope this helps someone like me who was sweating the first bottling experience.
Just bottled my first brew! (hints and tips)
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