So we bottled the beer last night – only a week behind schedule. I’m blaming the cold weather.

We lined up our 27 freshly-sterilised bottles on the worktop, opened the bag of caps we’d ordered on Monday and spread out a towel. Not that we thought we’d need it.

Last time we bottled the beer it went everywhere. We made the mistake of putting the fermenter up on the worktop and the bottles on the floor. The speed at which it came out made a garden hose on full power look positively tame.

But since then we’ve brewed and bottled our own wine, and learnt a few lessons. We’ve also bought a funnel. A bit of an impulse purchase, but very logical once you think about it.

The key, you see, is not to disturb the thick layer of yeasty sediment at the bottom of the fermenter. Not nice if you get it in the bottles. So to speed things up and save on spills we put the first fermenter just a foot off the floor and syphoned its contents into the second. The sediment stayed safely away from the beer, left behind in the fermenter we used for the brew.

That left us free to disturb the liquid in the second fermenter as much as we wanted by scooping it out with a measuring jug and pouring it into the bottles through the funnel, along with a spoonful of sugar.

It’s so much easier. In an hour, we had 27 bottles, a pop-top flask and a 5-litre demijohn filled to their brims, ready for opening by boxing day. And not a single drop on the floor.

Why did we ever do it any other way?

Related posts:

1. Bottling the wine
2. Bottling our homemade beer
3. Brewing beer at home