Wow those 2 weeks flew by! My beer has been nicely fermenting in the spare room and is now ready to bottle! And what better way to bottle my beer than with one of our many glass beer bottles. Join me in this addition of my homebrew blog to see how I bottled my Christmas home brew kit.
I've collected a few new bottles from the Sen5es store, including Mr Bertie Bottle! I've also used some old beer bottles from some tasty beer I've had recently. Because reusing glass bottles and jars is an important step in the recycling and reusing process.
The first step, as with every other food/drink product is to sterilise the bottles and equipment. I still had some sterilising solution leftover from brew day so I mixed this up with some water and used it to sterilise my bottles, all my equipment and yes the draining board too!
The next step was to dissolve 3 tablespoons of honey with 1/2 a cup of water. This gets mixed in with the beer in a large pot. The carbonation comes from adding sugar when bottling.
Next was the siphoning. This didn't quite go to plan as the beer didn't want to leave the bottle as easily as I had hoped. After several false starts I managed to get it to work by lifting the bottle much higher than the pot and giving gravity an extra hand. As you can imagine this got quite tiring after a while!
Once all the beer was siphoned out of the jug (leaving the trub or gunk at the bottom). I then had to siphon the new beer and sugar water mixture off in to bottles. Again I had to lift the pot up higher to get a good flow on the beer pouring but I managed to fill the bottles quite easily.
Lastly the bottles needed capping. I used a mixture of colours of our 26mm Crown Caps. I think the sky blue is my favourite but I wanted a nice colourful batch of beer. I used our handheld beer capper to apply the crown caps to the beer bottles.
And that was it! Now I have to wait another 2 weeks before I can drink by beer! Fingers crossed it turns out well.
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Thanks for tuning in to my first homebrew adventure. Let us know in the comments below if you want to see more homebrew adventures from me.
All the best
Paul at Sen5es.co.uk