Bottling our homemade beer

Our first batch of beer. We made 29 pints.

After two weeks in the fermenter, it was finally time to bottle the beer this weekend. The cat will be glad, as it means he won’t have a big bubbling tub next to his food bowls; he’s been suspicious about it since the whole enterprise began.

So we lifted the 40-pint fermenter onto the worktop – no mean feat in itself – and carefully lifted the lid. As expected, there was a ring of scum around the edge, but the beer itself was clear and unclouded, and smelt exactly as you’d expect. So, things were looking good.

Opening the beer fermenter

Before you can bottle it, you have to be sure it’s ready. After all, you don’t really want it reacting inside the bottles, as that could change the pressure and present a danger. You have two options: either you keep a close eye on it for the bubbles to stop rising, or you use a hydrometer. This is a glass device with a weight in one end and a scale up the side that you drop into a sample of your brew. It measures the so-called ‘gravity’ of your beer and tells you both when it’s ready for bottling, and what the alcohol content is.

The measurement is relative to water’s gravity at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and beer’s measurement should be just slightly higher than this, at around 1.06 (water is 1.00).

Testing the beer using a hydrometer

We had some difficulty here. Although our measurement was very close to the required 1.06, it wasn’t quite there, so we had some doubts as to whether it was ready for bottling. However, at the same time, it had been in the fermenter for two weeks, and the instructions on our starter kit clearly stated that it should need only four to six days.

We looked carefully at the brew itself and could only see a very occasional bubble floating to the surface so decided, after some discussion, that it was probably ready for bottling.

This is a quite exciting and rather fast-moving process. We laid out a large bath towel on the kitchen floor and put a washing up bowl onto it. Next, we fed half a teaspoon of sugar into each bottle (all of which had been thoroughly sterilised in advance) and put them into the bowl.

The kit came with a syphoning tube that clips onto the rim of the fermenter. Onto the end of this you attach a sediment trap, which is a small cup that forces the beer to travel down before it rises into the syphon, and you then lower the whole arrangement into the liquid, about half way down the fermenter.

What happens next can get quite messy. Because your fermenter is on a worktop and your bottles are on the floor, gravity can make it flow out rather quickly. You start it off by sucking the end of the syphon until the beer comes down the tube to a point lower than the sediment trap and then quickly transfer the end of the syphon to the neck of your first bottle. The full weight of the first 20 pints of your beer will be pressing down on the flowing liquid, which will come out faster than you can cope with on your own. It took two of us working very quickly to keep swapping out the bottles as they filled, and we still managed to get plenty of it into the bowl and onto the towel.

In fact, so quickly did we have to work that we didn’t even have time for a picture.

There will be sediment at the bottom of your fermenter barrel

We got 29 pints out of the fermenter, all told, but didn’t go any further as we didn’t want to risk getting sediment into the last few bottles. This is bitter and not at all nice to drink, so we washed it away, and were surprised that it came out as a creamy sand, rather than a thick black Marmite-like gloop, like the malt we had poured in, along with the sugar, at the start of the process.

Of course, stopping after 29 pints rather than the 40 we had budgeted for does change the cost per pint calculation slightly, upping it to 17p per pint from our original estimation of 12p.

Using the capping device

After clearing up the kitchen floor, we were left only with the task of capping the bottles. This is quick, easy and fun – so long as you have a capping device. It looks like a large pair or nutcrackers, and has a small recessed magnet in the top. You slip in the cap, and let the magnet hold it in place, then position it over the neck of each bottle and pull down the arms to crimp the rim of the cap onto the bottle’s mouth. It should now be airtight and able to withstand pressure.

But the beer still isn’t ready to drink just yet. It has to sit in the bottles for another couple of weeks, although we may well leave ours for a month. Our initial tests proved it to have a very bitter aftertaste, which we’re hoping the sugar in the bottles will do something to tame.

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