There are a million web sites with steps on how to bottle beer but I wanted something super detailed I could read from the moment I finish brewing.
While it’s fermenting, it’s time to start looking at the bottle situation. You have your bottle exchange you can always raid but you gotta go uptown and get them. Here is the math.
48-54 12 ounce bottles
32-35 16 ounce bottles
24-26 22 ounce bottles
16-18 32 ounce bottles
Bottles are rinsed if drank at the condo or if they are from bottle exchange, just throw them in the kitchen closet where you store your empties. This is the pre-stage for the label removing stage.
Once that shelf fills up, it’s time to toss those bad boys in the big black tupperware container. Now next time you brew, and this is important since there is a lot going on when you brew. Make sure to figure out a easy way to fill that tupperware container with the blazing hot water that comes out of the wort chiller. This will save you money instead of using the hot water and it’s also helping the planet by re-using the water. Don’t forge to toss in the oxi clean.
Okay you’ve let the bottles sit a few days and maybe it’s Friday. Lets clean off those labels. Steel wheel takes care of the ones that fight you. As you clean them, lets put them in the dishwasher for a sani run when we bottle.
This is tricky because you have to time to the label removing hot water of brew #2 with the bottling of brew #2. Anyway, hypothetically you could remove the labels and then immediately put it in the dishwasher.
Dishwasher runs, yay clean bottles.
It’s bottling day time. Lets take all of the bottles out and place them on the stove, as we take them out of the dishwasher lets spray inside and tops with starsan and then put it on the stove.
While we do this, let’s go ahead and boil that sugar water. 3 cups of water seems to be good amount. Boil that while you empty the dishwasher but keep a eye on it. Once it’s boiled let’s remove it and put it on a wet towel so it cools down faster.
Let’s open the bucket and see if it looks okay. Be super careful not to accidentally let water or vodka from the blow off thing drip into the beer since that happened once and it’s a great way to probably infect that beer you just bottled. Anyway, we put the primary femerntor on the counter and the bottling bucket on the stool. Santize the damn bottling bucket because I’ve never screwed that step up but let us not ever do that.I read on the Internet that you should pour the chilled sugarwater in the bottom of the bottling bucket so let’s do that.
Now let’s sanitize the pump and the tube start siphoning.
Okay, let’s just hope this goes well and now we have a bottling bucket full of non infected beer. Let’s put this over the dishwasher and open up the dishwasher. Attach the bottling wand with the custom bad ass tube that never slips off the bottling bucket spraying beer everywhere like what used to happen.
Grab bottle #1, pour starsan out into dishwasher thing and start bottling.
As you fill them just put them back on the stove so it’s just one place to clean.
Bottle like a boss.
Bottling intensifies.
Caping them things. While we were boiling water, we threw the bottle caps in some star san and sanitized water.
We finish putting the caps on. We would normally label them at this point with a sharpie and the p2p bottle stamp which I need to buy.