Just finished first bottling

I just finished my first bottling (a Scottish ale), and other than shooting a stream of SanStar over my laptop (it's a small miracle that it survived with only a few splashes on the screen...those siphons are unpredictable!), I think it went really well. The one thing I know to do next time is to put the priming sugar into the bottling bucket and then siphon the beer. I poured the sugar mixture into the beer, gently mixed, then siphoned into the bottling bucket...not that big of a mistake.

I also had a little trouble getting the bottling siphon going. I transferred to the bottling bucket using an auto-sihpon but used the old suck-and-pinch method to get the filling wand started. The first couple of bottles received an extra dose of oxygen, but from there on out it was all beer.

I also snuck a taste of my second batch, a hefeweizen, which has been in the primary for 7 days. It tastes like a hefeweizen! Gravity has dropped from 1.048 to about 1.012, so I think it's almost done. Planning on leaving it in the primary for another 2 weeks before bottling.

Can't wait to taste these when they're beer!

Congrats and welcome to home brewing! It's important to "sneak" tastes from your batches. It's the only way you will ever figure this hobby out.

Well, it's not actually a bottling bucket. It's really just an extra pail that I have, but I wanted to transfer out of the primary fermenter into a clean bucket so I wouldn't have to worry about sucking up anything from the primary and could focus on the bottling (even though I did have a straining bag over the end of the siphon). Maybe a true bottling bucket is in my future.