Bottling Day

My first attempt at home brew finished fermenting the other day which meant it was time to bottle. It had been two weeks and a few days since brew day and the airlock had more or less stopped bubbling. If a beer is bottled too soon, there can be too much fermentable sugar left over which can cause the bottles to explode while fermentation continues. I spent the evening cleaning out bottles and getting ready. I had about fifty some bottles left over from all the beers I had been enjoying through the blog process which was more than enough for the five odd gallons that were brewed.

I peeled the top of of the fermenting tub and was greeted with a wave of massive hopiness. It smelled like an incredibly concentrated cloud of cascade hop gas. It made my eyes water and nearly caused to start coughing into the batch. I siphoned off a bit for the hydrometer reading and found that it had a final gravity 1.012. The original gravity was 1.052. This difference shows how much "stuff" fermented and became alcohol. This beer will be about 5.5% ABV.

I siphoned off the beer into the bottling tub and added the priming sugar. This sugar will be food for the yeast and will be fermented in the bottle to provide carbonation. I had tasted the beer when measuring the FG and it tasted like a nice and hoppy pale ale. A flat pale ale, but it tasted like beer nonetheless.

The beer left a thick nasty looking sludge in the bottom of the fermenting tub which used to be the yeast and other proteins that had settled during fermentation. This did not taste like beer and was, in fact, quite disgusting. I did manage to find the missing gasket that was pushed through during the first night, so great success!

The bottling itself was not to eventful, but now I have a cabinet of bottled homebrew that should be ready to drink in two weeks.