Bottling Day: Stout

(Continued from earlier)

I decided it was time to bottle the stout after 5 days of secondary. The beer was pretty clear prior to secondary anyway, and the gravity didn't change in the 5 days, so no big deal.

Black as midnight

Step 1 of bottling is to delabel and sanitize all the beer bottles. Today we learned that washing out the bottles before adding them to the collection goes a long way to cleanliness. We had to throw out about 12 bottles because of gunk stuck on the bottom. Regardless, we still had enough bottles at the end to fill everything.

Step 2 was sanitizing all the equipment; the autosiphon, the bottling bucket, the bottle caps, etc.

Next, we dissolved 7 ounces of dried malt extract (DME) in 2 cups of water to act as our priming sugar. Yeast in the beer will react with the sugar to create CO2 to condition and preserve the bottles.

Moving back to the brew closet, we placed the dissolved DME in the bottling bucket and siphoned the beer onto it. This bucket was moved downstairs for bottling. We placed the bucket on the upper counter and siphoned the beer into bottles down on the floor.

Ready for filling!

Carefully filling up the bottles

My roommate taking a turn at filling

Once filled, the bottles needed to be capped, easily accomplished with the bottle capper we bought. We filled up around 40 bottles of beer, not too bad.

Before

After

So now the beer needs to condition for 1 week before drinking. Until then, cheers!

Ready to drink! (in one week)

One for you, one for me.... and maybe one more for me