Happy Friday again, beer fans! This week we have the penultimate chapter of Homebrewing!
In previous episodes, we've had Ingredients, Mashing, Boiling the Wort, and Fermentation.
The beer is fermented, cleared, and ready to package. You have reached a fork in the road and must decide whether it goes into bottles or into a keg. I will describe the bottling process tonight; Grainpaw has written about kegging and we'll run that next week.
What are the advantages of bottling? Mostly, avoiding buying the extra equipment for kegging. It's a classic example of trading labor against capital. For kegging I would need to buy kegs, taps, CO2 plumbing, an extra fridge, need to find a place for the extra fridge, need to pay to run that fridge 24/7. It's also easier to accumulate bottles of beer - when I was brewing frequently I might have 4 or even 5 varieties in the closet at once.
But there's no bigger pain involved in homebrewing than cleaning and sanitizing all those bottles, which is a difference of a couple hours labor for each batch of beer. Also, it requires a lot of waiting time. You can force-carbonate a keg of beer in little more time than it takes to chill it, but naturally carbonating the beer happens on the yeast's timeline not yours. 3 weeks in bottle before drinking is the standard rule.
OK. We start with a couple of cases of clean bottles. I have previously cleaned them by soaking in hot water with Oxyclean, scraping off the labels, rinsing, and drying on the bottle tree. The I cover the tops with foil and store them in case boxes until needed. The usual cardboard boxes aren't very durable (bottles can be reused for years) so I've built these from plastic storage crates, making dividers to separate the bottles. They only hold 20 bottles not 24 but are convenient because they stack well. 5 gallons of beer is just about 2 cases, which I typically divide between 12 22-oz bottles and 24 or so 12-oz bottles.
The bottles are clean but need to be sanitized, so we start by dunking them in a bucket of Iodophor and draining on the tree. That bucket with the valve at the bottom is the bottling bucket; the valve lets you drain the beer out easily without a siphon.
When the bottles are ready, dump the Iodophor into another bucket and rack the beer out of the carboy and into the bottling bucket, with a sanitized lid to prevent stuff from falling in while you're working.
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Now weigh out the priming sugar and make a syrup. This is how we will get the carbonation. There is still live yeast in the beer, and if you give them more sugar they will make it into more alcohol and CO2. In brewing jargon, the beer will be "bottle conditioned". Brewers yeast doesn't ferment sucrose (table sugar) very well, so we use dextrose, which homebrew stores call "corn sugar". For 5 gallons I use about 4 ounces of sugar. For best mixing you make it into a syrup, with a pint of water, boiled 10 minutes. I do this on the camp stove instead of carrying a pan of boiling syrup from the kitchen to the garage. Stir this into the beer with a large sanitized spoon. If you've ever been to a wine-growing region and taken the tour at a sparkling wine cellar, this is the same procedure they use to re-ferment champagne in the bottle. The French term for the priming sugar is "dosage".
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The bucket is sitting on the bench, so when you open the valve the beer will simply flow out into the bottle. The plastic tubing and bottling tool have been sanitized of course. The bottling tool is a spring-loaded valve that dispenses beer when you press down against the bottom of the bottle and stops when you pull up. For filling I put a few bottles in this old cooler to keep them from falling over and catch the inevitable spillage.
Now that all the prep is done, the actual bottling goes pretty quickly. It's best to have a helper so one of you can fill bottles and the other one cap them. Working alone I fill 5 bottles at a time and then stand up and cap them all. The caps are soaking in sanitizer until needed, you put one on top of the bottle and use the press to seal it.
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Obviously, before this time you have had to acquire bottles. Few homebrewers go to the brewing store and buy cases of new empty bottles. Most of us get them 6 at a time, filled with someone else's beer. Until you try to reuse them you don't think much about how bottles come in a number of shapes and sizes, though all holding 12 fluid ounces. Guinness bottles are unusually short for example. If the height isn't the same, you have to keep adjusting the press when you're putting the caps on. This is a pain. Over time I've recycled the ones that don't match. My favorite bottles to use are from Deschutes, they're the same height as Sam Adams and many other brands, and they have a pretty pattern of hops around the shoulder of the bottle. And I like drinking their beer.
A couple steps back when racking from carboy to bottling bucket we took a sample for the hydrometer and measured the final gravity. The formula is: (initial gravity - final gravity ) * 1000 / 7.5 = % alcohol by volume. A typical recipe might have 1.055 initial gravity, minus 1.010 final gravity, times 1000 is 45 "gravity points", divided by 7.5 is 6% alcohol.
As with all the other steps, there's plenty of cleanup still to do, washing the carboy, bucket, bottle filler and tubing. If there was half a bottle left at the end, you're drinking that now. The very last step is to make labels and put them on the bottles. Some homebrewers are lazy and don't label their beer, just maybe mark the cap with a sharpie. At the other extreme some do nice artwork. Both the main homebrewing magazines have annual label contests. I like to be creative, but within the limits of inexpensive 30 to the sheet mailing labels created in MS Word. Some recipes have their own name that I always use ("Antwerp's Placebo" is my DeKonick clone), others I'll take inspiration from the time of year like the Canada Day Brown (a couple falls in a row I called that recipe "Bad Football Brown", and the not-very-successful attempt to photoshop a deflated football is the hardest I've ever worked on a label).
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Finally we're done! 2 cases of beer go into the closet, to be ignored for 3 weeks.
I've got homebrewed pale ale, and splurged on some Ephemere. What are you drinking?