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.

 

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.

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.

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