Bottling Day!

Bottling day has finally arrived!  I stopped by my lhbs (local home brew supply) and picked up a few items to make my life easier: a spring-valve bottling wand, a vinator, a brew hauler carboy sling, and some bottles.  The bottling wand is a length of hard plastic tube with a spring valve at the end.  Once you get the siphon going, you pinch it closed with a plastic valve and attach the wand on the end of the hose.  Then, all you need to do is insert the end of the wand in the bottle and press it against the bottom of the bottle to begin the flow of beer.  When the bottle is filled, just lift up on the wand and the flow stops!  Ingenious.  The vinator is a device for sanitizing bottles.  It consists of a small dish filled with sanitizer, with a thin tube mounted vertically in the middle.  You turn the bottle upside-down, insert the tube into the neck of the bottle, and press down.  This pumps sanitizer up into the bottle where it coats the inside and then drains out.  Again, ingenious.  Finally, I needed to buy some bottles (my plan was to empty enough the old-fashioned way, but I didn't get nearly enough in time).  Fortunately, my lhbs was selling a used case of 12 20-oz amber bottles with ceramic ez-tops (like the Gorolsh bottles) for $3!  So, I only had to buy one case of 12 bottles to supplement.

Bottling turned out to be pretty easy, but prepping and sanitizing the bottles was someone time-consuming.  First, I soaked them all in water with a scoop of oxyclean overnight to remove any labels and gunk.  Then, I brushed the inside of each one with a bottle brush and rinsed them 3 times.  From there, I put them all in the dishwasher and ran it on "rinse only".  Finally, I sanitized them all with the vinator, and put them all back in the dishwasher rack to drain until bottling time.

The beer was in the 5 gal carboy, and needed to be primed before bottling.  Priming consists of adding a little bit of sugar to the beer just before bottling.  This re-activates the yeast in the bottle.  The yeast eat the sugar and give off CO2.  The CO2 fills the head space in the bottle, and then forces itself into the beer as the pressure in the bottle builds, carbonating the beer - a process known as "bottle conditioning".  So, I dissolved 4 oz. of corn sugar in 2 cups of boiling water on the stove.  I poured the sugar water into a 5 gal bucket, and then siphoned the beer from the carboy into the bucket.  From there, it was a simple matter of siphoning the beer into the bottles using the spring-valve bottling wand.  Then cap, and viola!  The beer is bottled!  It is supposed to sit somewhere warm (~65-70 deg F) and dark, and relatively easy to clean in case a bottle explodes from the built-up pressure.  So, for now the cases are sitting in a plastic tub in the upstairs bathtub.  Now I just have to wait 3 more weeks...