42 bottles is it?

[jc03]

I just finished up bottling my first batch. It's the 5 gallon Irish red ale that came with my starter kit. I didn't use a secondary and probably could have auto siphoned a little more I to the bottling bucket but only got 42 bottles. I marked the primary at 5 gallons and was pretty much spot on. It says it should yield 53-58 bottles. Is this normal or did I do something wrong?

 

[Hardin66]

It is what it is. You're fine. Relax and have a beer!

 

[bigmike99]

There's a lot that could go into it. Where all your readings in check? Did you boil off more than expected? How much trub did you leave behind?

It's certainly not a bad number if everything adds up gravity wise and worst case you left a few bottles worth of brew that would have been the ones with higher sediment in them.

 

[TxBigHops]

It could have been worse. I bottled my first batch last week and only ended up with 34 bottles. Made lots of mistakes along the way and learned something from every one of them. Understand that if you bottled every drop of 5 gallons, you would get about 53 bottles. (5 x 128 / 12 = 53.333) Obviously you left the trub and spent yeast and a little beer in the fermenter. Probably a little more beer in the bottling bucket. One big lesson I learned is that my future batches will be scaled up to 5.5 gallons. And that the bottling bucket will only be placed on something extremely stable - yeah, I bumped it and knocked it off a box it was sitting on. Splashed out a couple of bottles there, and who knows how badly I aerated the beer. :smack:

 

[wtfDean]

between primary, secondary and the bottle i go from ~5.5 gallons to 50 bottles (4.69 gal).

i usually watch netflix while i'm filling and sometimes i don't notice i've been overfilling the same bottle for a few seconds. clearly i suck at bottling.

 

[JPrather]

My first batch (5 Gallons) netted me 43 bottles.

My second batch, I somehow managed to put 5.75gal into the fermenter, and end up with a whopping 44 bottles. Don't ask how I pulled that off (unless you really want to know).

Don't worry about it too much, but pay attention to your procedure and note where you may be losing yield.

 

[jc03]

I appreciate all the comments. Next time I'm just going to scale up a bit.

 

[dsaavedra]

When I did my first batch I filled the fermentor up to 5 gallons exactly and I got 50 bottles out of it. I siphoned right on down to the trub and I had some help in tilting the bottling bucket to get the last few drops out.