After around 9 days of letting the batch of beer quietly ferment in a corner of the house and after checking the hydrometer for the second time I decided it was time to bottle it!
Before you bottle your beer you need to ensure it has stopped fermenting and the hydrometer has stayed at a consistent level for at least a couple of days. Once you have had two readings the same over a couple of days you can be reasonably sure its finished fermenting.
Expert tip – If you bottle your beer too early, you risk that the bottles may become over gassed, and even risk the possibility of them exploding!
Firstly I ran the bottles through the dishwasher with no soap powder, also I filled up a tub with 5 liters and water and the “no rinse” sterilization powder provided with my kit.
I rinsed the filler pipe and valve, added the bottle caps to the solution and started adding bottles from the dishwasher (once they had cooled down) into the solution.
Adding the filler pipe and valve to the tap on the fermenter cask was a simple process, I placed a dish underneath, rinsed out the first couple of bottles and began to fill!
To keep things interesting I used a variety of bottle sizes, 24 x 750 ml glass bottles, about 8 corona bottles and a few others.
Even our beautiful “Beer Wench” decided she wanted a turn and competently filled up her own bottle.
After filling the bottles, carbonation tablets were added. One for the smaller bottles and two for the big ones.
Finally the caps were pressed on, the first couple were interesting, you have to put quite a bit of pressure onto the bottle and you can really feel it when it clamps on nicely. I was a afraid of breaking a bottle at first however it seemed you can put quite a bit of force onto them with no problems.
Well after a couple of hours, a few drops spilt here and there all the bottles were filled. I cleaned out the equipment and packed it up ready for the next brew, moved the bottles to a safe area to work on their carbonation for the next couple of weeks and called it a night.
