Brewing your own beer can be a long and tedious process but you get to drink brew that you made, and it can be very rewarding. There are many online guides on how to brew and ferment it, but many people don’t pay a lot of attention to the last process – bottling beer. It’s important to bottle your beer hygienically and properly. If you fail to do so, all your previous hard work will be in vain. Let’s take a look at how brew is bottled, and I’ll give you a few tips on how to make this repetitive task go smoother and faster.
If your beer is done fermenting, you want everything that comes in contact with it to be sanitised and crystal clean. If you have a bucket, fill it up with a sanitising solution and throw in everything you’ll use to bottle and rack it, including canes, syphoning tubes, bottling wands, etc. Once everything is nice and clean you can start the process. First, you need to prepare the priming sugar that’s added inside the bottle in order for the beer to get the right level of carbonation. Add the sugar in a clean pan with twice as much water, and heat the liquid up with the lid on to the boiling point needed to sanitise the liquid and dissolve the sugar. Boil for about 5 minutes before removing it and allowing it to cool down.
Next, you have to prepare the home brew bottles. You should sanitise them using a bottle sanitiser and bottling tree for the fastest results, before filling the bottle injector with a no-rinse sanitiser. Pump a few squirts of sanitiser inside the bottles before placing them on a bottle tree while you work on the next bottle. You should also sanitise the caps inside a bowl with the same no-rinse sanitiser. If you don’t have an injector and tree, you’ll need to sanitise each bottle by hand and then drain and rinse it by hand. While this will still get the job done, you’ll have to spend extra time making sure the sanitiser is cleansed from the bottles’ insides. After you’ve done all of this, it’s time to fill the bottling bucket with beer.
Once you’ve filled the bucket, it’s time to add the cooled priming sugar and syphon the beer on top of it carefully in order to avoid introducing oxygen by bubbling or splashing the beer and to not disturb the sediment on the bottom of the bucket. During this process, the sugar and beer should be mixed properly. If you don’t have a bottling bucket, you’ll need to stir the priming sugar with a sanitised spoon carefully. Now comes the actual process of filling your home brew bottles.
Attach the bottling want to the tap of the bucket, open the tap and press the tip of the bottling wand to start filling the bottles. If you don’t have a bucket with a tap, filling the bottles will be more tricky, but you can still attach the bottling wand to the end of the syphon hose and fill the bottles. Once you’ve filled a bottle, put a cap in the capper and seal it. This will reduce the amount of air that comes in contact with your beer, and it will prevent you from spilling any. Fill all the bottles you have, label them and store them away for a couple of weeks.
Your beer wants to avoid direct contact with oxygen as much as possible, as that can shorten its shelf life and cause unwanted stale flavours. The whole process of bottling beer opens up a lot of opportunities for air to get in with the beer. For that reason, avoid bubbling, splashing and general contact with the atmosphere. Bottling wands help with this a lot as they help fill the bottles from the bottom up. Keep the ends of the syphon hose submerged so that there’s no splashing, and cap the bottles as soon as possible to keep oxygen out.
Bottling can be a chore that involves a lot of cleaning, but it’s an essential part of the process. Keep your bottling equipment in a hygienic and clean environment to avoid spoiling the beer. That’s why it’s important not to rush it and invest in quality bottling equipment like a bottle sanitiser and bottling tree. All of the equipment won’t break your bank, yet will play a crucial role in the final quality of your beer, and it only makes sense to buy quality equipment once than having to repeatedly purchase new equipment. And remember, you’re doing all of this for your own pleasure and enjoyment, and nothing beats cracking open a bottle of your home brown beer after a hard day at work, or with your best friends on a weekend barbecue party. So always have this in mind when going through the tedious bottling process.