Remember this post?
Well a few weeks ago we got to bottle that brew. It was quite the event! My in-laws were visiting for the weekend so we made a bit of an assembly line out of the process.
First step was sanitizing all of our bottles and equipment.
While those were soaking, I started a mix of sugar and water boiling on the stove.
We added it to the container we would be transferring the brewed beer to. The additional sugar re-activates the yeast and creates the carbonation you enjoy later.
Next the Hubs siphoned the brewed beer to the new contianer.
When we got towards the end we tipped it back on the table to get as much as we could without getting any of the sediment from the bottom.
We checked the specific gravity of the brew to see how on the recipe we were, we were right on at 1.016, meaning our beer was a 3.7% alcohol by volume.
With the brew transferred we started the assembly process. Hubs filled the actual bottles, more on that coke bottle in a minute.
Then my father-in-law clamped on the bottle cap. We used those rubbermaid lids to help with cleanup later on.
Then it was up to me and my mother-in-law to wipe down filled bottles and keep handing over new bottles. When it was all said and done we ended up with a grand total of 49 beers.
We tried a trick the Hubs had got from a fellow brewer with the coke bottle. We filled it about an inch from the top and then squeezed the air out before we twisted the cap on tight. The theory was, the bottle would expand back to looking like a regular coke bottle as it carbonated and by that time, your beer should be ready to drink too.
It worked ok, the beer was carbonated and tasted ok but it still wasn’t quite finished. We gave it another week and had perfectly carbonated beer, very tasty! The bottling process was much more fun than the brewing part and it moves pretty fast. You’re also that much closer to being able to enjoy it!
mmmMinneapolis 