Bottling

Last weekend we decided it was time to bottle our beer. We actually let it go a bit longer than we were supposed to because we had gotten so busy with the CAA tournament the weekend before. While the directions for bottling seemed a lot more complicated than the brewing process, once we figured out what they were talking about it was easy.

There are a couple more steps before you actually get to the bottling including making a solution that will end up carbonating the beer while it's bottled, but I won't bore you with all the details.

First we had to siphon the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket.  We were a little nervous to open the lid of the fermenter, but we were pleasantly surprised that it actually smelled like beer!  We also had a bit of trouble trying to get the siphoning process started, but once it got going, it went fast.

After we figured all that stuff out, we had to sanitize all our bottles and then fill them.  The thing we used to fill them was spring loaded to prevent making a mess; however as you can see our floor still had to be mopped by the time we were finished.  We got into a rhythm though and got better about spilling as we went.

The last step in the bottling process was capping the bottles.  And no, we didn't spend time peeling labels off 50 empty bottles so they mostly all say Sam Adams save a few :)

The grossest part about the whole process though was the end.  We had to do some major clean-up.  There were buckets and siphons to wash, as well as other little things we used to make the process easier.  The floor obviously had to be mopped, too.

Now the beer has to sit in bottles for awhile to carbonate, so we'll let you know how it turns out when it's finally done!