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Bottled
By Mike | August 6, 2007
Today was the day that I bottled my first batch of beer. All things considered it went a lot smoother than I expected, and other than underestimating the time requirements I think everything went more or less to plan.
Step one today was to sanitize the bottles and equipment. This is the most time consuming and tedious part of the whole process. It takes quite a while to clean each and rinse each bottle. I’m glad I went with the 22oz bottles instead of the 12. That’s about half as many things that I need to clean.
I had been storing my bottles on top of my refrigerator in the basement, and my cat seems to think that makes a great hideout. She was none too pleased when I had to reclaim the bottles to clean and sanitize them. Yeah that’s right This blog is less than six months old and already I’ve resorted to posting pictures of my cat. That’s how I roll.
Once everything was sanitized it was start bottling. First I had to boil the bottle caps, to make sure they were not contaminated. I also boiled a cup and a quarter of malt extract with a pint of water. I added the malt extract to my bottling container. This new malt will provide sugars and nutrients for the now dormant yeast once its in the bottle. This will serve to carbonate the beer as its in the bottle.
Now its time to siphon the beer from the fermenter to the bottling container. This will allow us to extract the beer without all of the sediment that has settled to the bottom. I was a little concerned about the siphoning process, since I had never done it before, but I had this auto-siphon contraption that came with my kit, and it worked perfectly. You just put it in the fermenter, and pump it once or twice and before you know it your siphon is going.
Now that the beer has been separated from the sediment we can start filling the bottles, which was surprisingly easy.
Even the capping process, which I figured would be complicated was simple. Just put the cap in the capper, push down and you’re done.
So now I have 24 bottles of beer waiting in my basement for me to drink them. After about a week the yeast should have finished off the last of the malt and the beer should be ready to drink. All I have to do is wait. To quote Tom Petty… “The Waaaaiiting is the hardest part.”
[Edit***] Oh yeah. I forgot to mention, the final hydrometer reading was 1.011.
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