Bottling

Last weekend I bottled my first batch of beer, an American Wheat. The beer had finally finished fermenting with a final gravity of 1.012. The original gravity was 1.040 a difference of 0.028! That means the beer is about 3.5% alcohol so not too strong. The beer tasted like beer, except it was flat.

I made the priming solution, which is just hot water with dissolved corn sugar, and added it to the priming chamber (really just a bucket) and then drained the beer into the priming chamber as well making sure it was well mixed. The priming sugar is added to carbonate the beer. After the beer is bottled the remaining yeast in the beer ferments this sugar producing more alcohol and CO2. Since the bottle is sealed the CO2 has nowhere to go except to dissolve into the beer. And there's your carbonation.

Bottling the beer was very easy due to a little device that came in the box full of wine making supplies I got as an extra from a guy selling carboys. Basically it's a hollow plastic wand with a little metal rod sticking out the tip. The rob is secured by a spring, when you press the rod into the wand, liquid can flow through. When you aren't pressing, it can't. So it makes it pretty hard to let liquid out without intending to do so.

You're supposed to fill beer bottles until there's an inch of space between the beer and the cap. This is accomplished by sticking the rod all the way into the bottle and pushing on the bottom to release the beer and filling it to the rim. When you remove the wand the liquid displaced by it leaves it at just the right height.

Capping beer bottles is also quite easy. You simply place the bottle cap on top of the bottle, set the capper over the top of both and push the levers down until you feel it give. Removing the capper is actually a bit more difficult.

I ended up with 46 12oz bottles and 1 pint bottle full of beer. The challenge now is keeping the beer warm enough for the yeast to be able to carbonate the beer. As most of my readers know, we keep it crazy cold in our house during the winter; too cold for Ale yeast to be very active (which is why my next beer is going to be a lager). I stacked the beer in front of the heat vent in our bedroom and placed a blanket over it to hold in the warmth, hopefully that should do it.

In addition to the beer, I also bottled the cherry wine and the ghetto apple-raspberry wine. As an aside. I'm thinking of renaming the ghetto wine line to “Snob’s Nightmare” and just doing a completely separate label design.

I had finished degassing the Nightmare wine about a week or so ago. I had been storing it in two magnums (1.5 litre wine bottles) and used our wine pump to pull dissolved CO2 out of the wine. I poured both magnums of wine into a large stainless steel bowl to blend them together. I added sorbate (to kill any residual yeast) and added a little bit of sugar to bump up the sweetness just a little bit. I then siphoned the Nightmare into four standard wine bottles and corked them.

The semi-cold stabilization of the cherry wine in the fridge seemed to help it, it wasn't quite as sour as before it also cleared fairly well so I racked it off the fine lees and added sorbate. I then added sugar until it tasted good, three tablespoons was all it took. I poured it into a bottle and corked it. I only got one bottle of cherry wine but then I only started with about a pound of cherries.