Readers may remember my first Adventures in Homebrew, of several weeks ago. Then, in a somewhat bumbling and hapless fashion, a friend and I cooked up some homebrewed beer, and set it to ferment in a large glass jug. Now it's time to bottle the fermented concoction, and set it on its final path to being real beer.

How Much Booze in the Beer?

Actual fermentation time was about 16 days. During that time, the yeast population expanded, fed upon all the sugars in the malt, and slowly converted those sugars to alcohol. At this point in the game, we were probably looking at an alcohol content of around 5.0%

The way to tell the alcohol content of your beer for sure is to measure the Final Specific Gravity (FG) of the brew (think back to chemistry class) using a gravityometer. You then enter it into an equation 76.08*(OG-FG)/(1.775-OG), with OG being the Original Specific Gravity, and you should come out with your alcohol content! In this case, our OG was 1.06, and our FG was 1.01, which gave us a Alcohol by Weight percentage of 5.32%. Just right.

Getting Started

The whole bottling process, which is quite exciting, is predicated by a rather dull period of sanitization. This is when you must sanitize all of the bottles you’ve collected over the proceeding two weeks—any remaining bacteria will contaminate the beer and lead to spoilage, or worse, illness. This takes quite a long time (about 2 hours for 48 bottles) and is certainly the most time consuming part of the process.

With sanitization completed, the real bottling began. I started by uncorking the glass container the beer has been brewing in (known as a “carboy”), and pouring in a packet of Corn Sugar. This will stimulate the yeast into production again (now that they have more food), which will in turn give the beer carbonation in the bottle.

The First Taste

After mixing in the sugar, I put in a siphon hose, and I readied my first bottle. In order to get a good flow of beer coming out of the main container, and into the bottles, I had to get a siphon going. So I sucked on the hose… hard. A big mouthful of tasty (if flat) beer later, the hose was spurting into the first bottle. The siphon is controlled by a pressure-release valve on the bottom of the hose, which you can engage by pressing it onto the bottom of the inside of the bottle.

After the bottle was full, I placed an uncompressed (somewhat flattened) cap onto the top, and used a capper clamp to seal it into place. The first bottle was completed! Success! However in my joy of capping, I had placed the siphon hose carelessly, and lost my siphon. So I had to take another big suck on the hose to get the siphon going. Mmm… sweet, flat beer filled my mouth, and then it filled another bottle.

Several More Tastes

This process repeated itself over the next hour. While I became more adept at keeping the siphon going between bottles, I had to do the hose suck routine many more times. Spillage was inevitable (when I overfilled a bottle or sucked too much beer into my mouth), and by the time my partner got home, she found my sitting on the floor, sticky with beer and surrounded by bottles, glassy eyed and satisfied. She helped me bottle the last few, and to clean up before I went promptly to bed.

The final test will be in two more weeks, when the first bottle will be opened, and we can relish in our success (or commiserate in our failure). Either way, homebrewing has been quite a process, and I’m already looking forward to my next batch (particularly to bottling my next batch!).