In celebration of Learn to Homebrew Day, this is part 3 of a series of How to Homebrew tutorial videos. Read on below or Watch the video about how to bottle your homebrew. You can watch Part 1: Equipment here and Part 2: Extract American Ale Brewday here
First thing thing you’re going to want to do is make sure that your bottling bucket has it’s valve on. Most are just a plastic thread on valve and super easy to hand tighten.
Before we put in our beer in the bucket we need to measure out how much sugar we are going to use to carbonate it. The sugar needs to get added because there’s basically nothing left for the yeast to ferment in the fermenter. The beer is fully fermented so to carbonate it we need to give the yeast something to eat so that they can fart CO2 and carbonate your beer.
If you get a kit they usually send you exactly how much corn sugar you need. For a 5 gallon kit they gave me 4oz of corn sugar. The going wisdom is you put one ounce of corn sugar to one gallon of wort. If you are using table sugar or raw sugar (stray away from honey, it can cause explosions) check out this calculator, it can give you exactly how much sugar you need for how much carbonation you would like.
Once you’ve got your sugar measured go ahead and throw it in a soup pot (or if you’re fancy a beaker or flask) with a cup of water. Boil that for 5 minutes and stick it in your fridge to cool down. You can’t throw boiling sugar water into your beer or you’ll kill the yeast that you need to carbonate it!
While you’re waiting on your sugar water to chill out, you can prep your sanitizer and bottles. To sanitize your equipment you can use Starsan, Idophor, bleach (not recommended), etc. I don’t love bleach because it can give your beer a medicinal taste if you don’t get it all the way out and Idophor will stain your equipment so we’re going to talk about Starsan. Starsan is a no rinse sanitizer which means you can just drain it from your bottles and but beer right in without having to rinse in between. You’re going to want to make a bucket of it (it’s 1oz of Starsan to 5 gallons of water) or get yourself a hudson sprayer so that you can spray it on. For the bottles you need to get the whole surface of the glass to prevent any infections. You will also need to sanitize your bottling bucket and anything and everything that will touch beer (hoses, bottling wand, bottle caps, wayward fingers, curious cat paws).
If you’re like me and are cheap as hell, you can reuse commercial beer bottles. I recommend cleaning them with a Brewery Wash or OxyClean free type food safe cleaner before sanitizing, just to make sure there’s no residual beer or microbes left in the bottle (these cleaners also help remove labels). My favorite bottles to reuse are Racer5. It’s a great beer and the labels come off like they were attached with a glue stick.
Once all your bottles and bottling bucket are clean you can add your sugar water solution right to the bottling bucket and transfer the beer on top of it. If you’re using a bucket or carboy that doesn’t have a valve you’re going to need a siphon. I have this one. Honestly, I hate siphoning and rarely do it because I’m terrible at it. I strongly suggest getting fermenters with valves. If you’re worried about budget, Fermonters are $33 so you can save your siphon money and get a fermenter that wont have you cursing the high heavens. If you have a valved fermenter, you can just throw a sanitized hose on the valve and let ‘er rip. Try to get your hose all the way to the bottom of your bucket to fill from the bottom up and minimize splashing (if you get a bunch of oxygen in the beer at this stage it can cause off flavors).
Once you have all your beer in your bottle bucket, you need to attach a sanitized hose to the valve on it. This is the tube the beer will go through to go into your bottles.
If you got a standard kit you may want to pick up a bottling wand. Some kits have them, some don’t, but it will make your life so much easier. There’s a spring inside the wand that allows the beer to freely flow when depressed but as soon as you pull the wand from the bottom of your bottle the flow stops and it leaves the perfect amount of headspace in your bottles for competition standards.
So after 10 paragraphs we’re ready to bottle! Preparation and cleaning are 80% of brewing…we swear it’s fun!
Here’s the idea: fill your bottle to about 1″ of the top, cap immediately and then move on to the next bottle. You don’t want to let your bottles sit out with no caps because Murphy’s law will inevitably happen. This is a great time to bribe a friend with some take home bottles for assistance bottling. One person fills the bottles, one person caps the bottles. It seriously saves a ton of time and tears.
If you run into broken bottle necks and trips to the emergency room THROW YOUR CRAP CAPPER IN THE GARBAGE! No $10 piece of plastic is worth those medical bills. Get yourself a decent capper. I like the Ferarri Emily, mainly because it makes me feel fancy to say I have a Ferrari but it’s also a decent piece of equipment.
So assuming you’ve made it this far and have some capped bottles with a minimal amount of blood in them you’re going to need to let them sit for two weeks. Don’t rush it unless you want some gastrointestinal and flavor no no’s. Store them in a cool dark place for the two weeks and a day or two before you have your world beer premier toss them in the fridge. This will help any yeast stranglers settle to the bottom of the bottle. When you serve these beers, please I beg you, pour them slowly into a glass leaving around an ounce in the bottle. That is all yeast and you don’t need that bitterness ruining your homebrewer reputation.
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