Brewing Up a Storm: Bottling

So what's been happening. Well the beer has been fermenting away now for about a week. Had a bit of a scare when I took my my first specific gravity (SG) test as the wort was very cloudy so there was a touch of panic that all my sanitisation did not have the desired affect and somehow my beer got infected. Not so and subsequent SG tests the beer had cleared up a lot. Apparently infected yeast is not all that common anyways. The wort had been bubbling away but does not always happen so do worry if it doesn't. What is really important is your SG measurements, as long as this is progressing nicely your beer is fermenting. Beer usually starts at a SG of around 1040 and ends up around 1003. No change over 24 hours tells you that you beer is ready for bottling.

First thing to do is the mind numbing task of sanitising your bottles, this just takes time and bleach or Milton. Use a bottle brush to get rid of any dirt in the bottles (cleaning them out immediately after use makes this much easier) then let them soak in bleach if about 20 minutes. Rinse them out with hot (some say cold) water to get rid of the smell. Make sure you do the caps as well.


Once you have them all nice and clean you need to add your priming sugars. The intention here is the let the remaining yeast in your beer consume the the sugar producing (a small bit of) alcohol and most importantly CO2. As your bottles are now airtight as the CO2 is produced it will be under pressure and will be forced back into the liquid giving you a nicely carbonated beer. The amount of sugar is largely dependant of the size of the bottle. You can get sugar drops from any of the brewing sites to help getting the amount right. Another option is to prime all your beer at once but adding the sugar to the fermenter or siphoning the beer into a bottling bucket and adding the primer to that. The ensures that all your beer is primed evenly and if you do not have the sugar drops is it much easier to weigh out the total amount as opposed to the amount per bottle.


My beer kit has a handy valve type thingy to help with bottling but a siphon or something like that will do the job. Try to make sure you do not move the fermenter (keep the bottling in mind with finding a place for the fermenter to live) as you will stir up the sediment will has graciously fallen to the bottom of the fermenter and out of your beer. The bottling bucket mentioned above can be useful here as well.

Once all you bottles are full and capped you need to invert the bottles to make sure the sugar is well mixed up. The bottles need now to be stored upright back in the hot press for at least another week. The beer at that point is ready to drink but its recommended to wait up to 3 months (if you can).