Bottling the First Batch

After brewing up my first batch of home brew on January 9, I patiently waited 2 weeks and started checking the carboy. I check the specific gravity and got the same reading over three days – 1.011. It was time to bottle. I had a few hours after the kids went to bed to get it all done and had previously washed some empty bottles a few days before. So I went and gathered up everything I needed and had a setup for bottling all planned out.

I don’t have a bottle tree yet, so I planned on using the dishwasher to drain and hold my bottles—just rinsed with StarSan. I had a bucket of StarSan to hold my other supplies and placed my bottle caps in a small tub of StarSan to keep the sterilized and handy. Over on HomeBrewTalk, I had seen a few brewers mount their bottling wand directly to the bottling bucket and I thought that was a great idea. I sterilized my bottling bucket and was ready to transfer my beer from the carboy to the bucket and bottle.

Transfer to Bottling Bucket Stirring in the Priming Sugar

First off, get an auto-siphon. It’ works great and I was transferring to the bucket in no time. As I transferred, I mixed in my 5 oz. of priming sugar—boiled in 1C of water—with a sterilized mixing spoon. It didn’t take long and the beer was transferred to the bucket and ready to bottle.

Bottling setup

I moved the bucket over the dishwasher, so the door would catch any drips. Which turned out to be a great plan. Since I didn’t have to worry about making a big mess, the actual bottling didn’t take long at all. As a matter of fact, I had everything bottled in about 20-minutes. It took longer to clean everything up than it did to actually bottle everything.

First 6 Ready to Cap

I would bottle six, cap and then repeat the process. I was a little nervous about using the capper, but after the first six, I sped up quite a bit. I stored the bottles in the closet, ready to wait another 10 days before I could try it.

However, that turned out to not be the case…stay tuned

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