Bottling Notes (done on day 15, 25nov2007)

Got 11 24 oz bottles (Sam Adams) and 50+ 12 oz bottles (various, brown glass, pop top) to use. Its fun having to make yourself and your friends drinks beers to empty bottles :)

With all the bottles, I had rinsed them and ran them through the dishwasher initially and attempted to remove the labels with varying degrees of success.

The morning prior to bottling, I ran all the bottles through the dishwasher using NO DETERGENT on the heavy wash/sanitize cycle to sanitize them. Made sure they were cool before I started:

BOTTLING:

1 - Sanitized bottling bucket, spigot, hoses, bottling wand, bottle caps, and a stirring spoon in bleach solution again.

2 - Boiled 3/4 cup corn sugar in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes.

3 - Rinsed bottling bucket and spigot, assembled them. Poured corn sugar solution in to bottling bucket.

4 - Attached larger diameter hose (after rinsing) onto drum tap, removed air lock, and drained the beer into the bottling bucket. I started slow flow at first and once the hose was a couple inches under the beer level, I cranked it up to speed up the process. Once the beer had flowed until the level was under the drum tap, I closed the tap (I didn't bother tilting the fermentor to get the last bit because the yeast slime at the botton of the fermentor would have gotten sucked in with it, don't want all that yeast in my beer).

5 - Rinsed the sanitized spoon and then stir the beer in the bottling bucket for a minute or so to mix in the corn sugar liquid nice and even (don't want flat or exploding bottles). Then took the lid off the fermentor and placed it on the bottling bucket to keep any junk out.

6 - Rinsed and attached the bottling hose and bottling wand to the bottling bucket. Had to tilt and move the hose to get the beer all the way in it.

7 - Time to bottle: 1 by 1 with the help of friend, we took turn taking bottles out filling them to the top with the wand and then placing a cap loosely on each bottle. Once we were finished, we took turns capping them using the capper in the order they were bottled.

8 - Total output: 8 x 24oz bottles, 3 x 22oz bottles, 27 x 12oz bottles ( + 1 pint of flat celebration beer!!)

9 - Put them in the dark up in my room ~ 70F to carbonate (adds somewhere from .5% alcohol to negligible amounts as well, at least according to various internet sources ..... who knows, sometone give me a definitive answer if you want)

I'm hoping in two weeks to have some delicious beer.