Process 102: Bottling your first batch

About two weeks ago, now, you brewed your first batch.  And like a new mother enthralled with her firstborn, you’ve spent the past fortnight gazing lovingly at your amber-coloured creation softly bubbling away in your coat closet, or maybe a warm corner of your garage.

But now it’s time get that beer (it’s no longer ‘wort’: once it’s fermented, it’s beer!) into bottles for carbonation and conditioning.

Before you start bottling, make sure you’ve got the following on-hand and ready:

Enough bottles to hold five gallons of beer. This works out to roughly 44 12 oz. bottles. I usually bottle a few larger (22 oz.), and sometimes a few smaller (10 oz.) ones with each batch, but make sure I have enough bottles cleaned and sanitized to have a few left over.

Bottle caps & capping tool. Enough caps for all the bottles you have.

1 cup of corn sugar for ‘priming.’ This is what will make your beer carbonated. Adding sugar just before bottling will give the yeast a bit more to ferment. As it ferments it will emit carbon dioxide (the same as what bubbles out of the airlock when your beer is in the fermenter). However, in the bottle, with an airtight cap, that CO2 will have nowhere to go, and your beer will become carbonated.

(As you get more practice and get into more advanced recipes you can try priming with other things (molasses, DME, etc.). But the standard for basic, straightforward home-brewing is corn sugar: It carbonates in a just a few days and does not impart any flavor to the finished product.)

A long-handled mixing spoon or spatula.

A ‘racking cane’ or enough tubing to siphon your beer out of the fermenter. A racking cane is just a straight, stiff clear plastic tube with a crook on one end (looks like a cane, hence the name). You put the long part of the cane down into your fermenter, and then attach a siphon tube (about four feet) to the crook end at the top.

5 gallon bucket with a spigot added: perfect for priming and bottling.

A 5-gallon bucket for mixing your beer with priming sugar.

I’ve put a food-grade spigot (buy online or at a brewing supply store) about 1/2 inch up from the bottom of mine to make bottling easier.

Several old towels. Bottling can get messy. Good to have towels around for wiping up spills.

Got everything? Great – now you’re ready to start. To bottle your beer, do these steps in order:

1) In small saucepan bring 1 cup of corn sugar and 2 cups of water to a boil, then simmer for about 10 minutes (to totally sanitize it). Cover and cool to room temperature. It takes a while for this to cool, so I always do this step first, then worry about everything else. You can put the saucepan into the refrigerator to cool it down faster.

2) Move your fermenter to wherever you plan to siphon the beer into the bucket you’ll use for priming. I use the laundry room – set the fermenter on the dryer (one of the old towels underneath). When you move the fermenter, you’ll slosh the yeast slurry on the bottom around a bit. Doing the move early allows it to settle back before you siphon (helps your finished beer look clearer).

3) Sanitize all of your equipment thoroughly. I use iodine sanitizer. It’s 1 tablespoon per 5 gallons of cold water. immerse everything and then allow it to air dry: the inside and outside of the racking cane and siphon tubing; the mixing spoon; the inside of the bucket you’ll use for priming; all of the bottle caps…

This is an extremely important step: Follow the directions with whatever sanitizer you use carefully and take the time to do it properly. It doesn’t matter how good your recipe is or how well you brewed, if you get this step wrong, you’ll ruin your beer.

You’ll have to sanitize all of your bottles, too. I sanitize bottles using regular iodine solution, and then running through a fast dishwasher cycle (no soap, just water).

4) Siphon (‘rack’) your beer into the priming bucket and add your priming sugar.

Putting as little of your lips as possible on the end of the tube, suck (siphon) until beer starts to flow into the bucket…Take the airlock off of your fermenter and insert the long end of the racking cane down into the beer. Attach your siphon tubing to the crook end of the racking cane and dangle the other end down into the bucket (you sanitized it, right?) that you’re siphoning into. (see photo)

Once you have about an inch of beer in the bottom, slowly pour your cooled priming sugar solution into the bucket (don’t stop the siphon), and very gently stir with the (sanitized) mixing spoon.

After you’ve added the priming sugar, continue to rack (brewing word for ‘siphon’) the rest of your beer into your priming bucket, stirring occasionally with the sanitized mixing spoon.  Stop racking just before your racking cane begins to ‘suck’ up the sludge from the bottom of the fermenter.

Note: if you use a hydrometer to calculate alcohol content, be sure to capture beer that has not been mixed with priming sugar, as this will throw off the reading. I usually just put my measuring cylinder under the siphon tube to catch beer as it flows into the priming bucket.

5) BOTTLE!

If your priming bucket has a spigot, all you have to do now is fill the bottles. I usually do this in a kitchen sink (put the priming bucket on the counter with the spigot hanging over the sink).

If your bucket does not have a spigot, you’ll need to use a kitchen funnel (with a nozzle small enough to fit into the mouth of a bottle). It will take two people to bottle this way – one to pour, and one to hold the bottle and funnel steady.

Either way, you’ll want to pour slowly to avoid a foamy head coming up out of the bottle. This loses space in the bottle, and increases the chance of ruining the beer by infection.

Let the foam subside before filling to within about 1 inch of the top

Fill each bottle to within about 1 inch of the mouth, then cap tightly with a sanitized cap.

Using a capping tool.

flip-top bottles are super easy to bottle in and reusable, too!

6) Aging. And…. we’re back to the waiting. After bottling you’ll need to age your beer for at least 7-10 days for the yeast to do its’ work on the priming sugar and carbonation to take effect. Most home-brew recipes are drinkable after 1 week (7 days), but I find that most of the ones I’ve made really started to taste good after about 1 month in the bottle.

At any rate, it’s worth experimenting a bit from batch to batch. Keep track of when you bottle which batches and make notes of how they taste at 1 week, 2 weeks, and so on. This way, if you make that same recipe again, you’ll have a better idea of how long it needs to age for optimum taste.

Because taste is what it’s all about right? And this is the perfect segway to…

7) Drinking the finished product…

No explanation needed.

Process 101: brewing your first batch

So, you’ve got your basic equipment. You’ve found a nice recipe for basic ale online. And your wife just gave you a hall pass for Saturday morning. You’re ready to brew your first batch of beer!

Today we’ll cover what you need to turn a grocery bag full of ingredients into five gallons of fermenting beer (we’ll cover bottling in a later post). There are four basic steps:

1) The steep. In this step you bring 5 gallons of water to 155 degrees F. and then place malted, cracked grains (often called “crystal”) in it for 30 minutes. It’s a bit like putting dried leaves into hot water to extract the flavor and aroma when you make tea.

In the process of making beer from malt-extract, this step accomplishes two main things. First, it extracts fermentable sugars from the grains, which increases the alcohol potential of the beer you’re making. Second, at the same time it extracts flavor from the grains – flavor which eventually ends up in your beer. When brewing extract-based recipes it’s easy enough to get fermentable sugar (if all else fails, you can just add white table sugar), but the flavor which comes from grains in this step is one of the controls that you have over the taste of the final product.

So get your five gallons of water into the pot, over the fire on your camping stove or turkey fryer, get the temperature up to 155 degrees as quickly as possible, and then turn down the fire enough to maintain that temperature. Put the grains into the hot water, and stir gently with a large kitchen spoon. Steep for a full 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

After 30 minutes, turn off the heat and remove the grains. If you had your grains in a steeping bag, just take the bag out. If not, fish them out with a regular kitchen strainer. The water should be a distinct beige -to-brown color, depending on the roast of your grains, with steam rising gently off the surface.

remove steeped grains

2) The boil. Once the grains are out, you want to crank up the heat and get that brown water to a boil as quickly as possible. Be sure to watch the pot closely once you begin to see little bubbles coming up from the bottom. At the first sign of boil…

Stir in your malt extract. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using liquid malt extract (LME) or dry malt extract (DME) – the process is exactly the same: get it stirred in and dissolved in your five gallons as quickly as possible. You want to stir constantly during this step a) to keep your malt extract from carmelizing on the bottom of your brew pot, and b) to make sure that you don’t boil over during this step. You’ll know when your wort is about to boil because it will become very foamy on the top and start to rise quickly.

5 gallons with extract added, just about to boil...

Once your malt extract is all stirred in you’ll maintain the heat under your pot until you get a full boil. Add your aroma hops at this stage, too. I usually add aroma hops immediately after stirring in my malt-extract, while the pot is coming to a boil. It is very important to monitor your pot carefully and turn down the heat just as the boil starts so that you don’t have a boil-over. Turn down the heat just enough to maintain a strong boil without boiling over.

You need to boil your wort for a full 60 minutes, measured from the boil begins after you add the malt extract.

10 minutes before the end of the boil (at 50 minutes), add your bittering hops.

At 60 minutes turn off the heat, remove your hops and cover the pot.

3) Cooling the wort. Once the boil is finished you want to chill your wort down to about 70 deg. F. as quickly as possible, as this is the phase where you are most likely to  ruin your batch by infecting it. (It is critical that nothing touches the wort which has not been sanitized. So sanitize everything – more on sanitizing in a later post). You can simply cover your pot tightly and let it sit as ambient temperature to cool, but I don’t recommend this as it will take 5 – 7 hours to cool sufficiently – 5 -7 hours during  which your wort is extremely vulnerable to infection.

A very common way to cool wort is to put your brew pot in a large laundry sink and surround it with ice and cold water. Be sure to keep the lid tightly on the pot so that nothing gets in to contaminate it. When the water in the tub becomes warm, drain it out and replace it with new cold water. Use a sanitized thermometer to check every 10 – 15 minutes (I use a photographic dark room thermometer). If you use ice, you should be able to cool 5 gallons of fresh wort down to 70-75 F. in about 1 hour.

A final way is to use something called a “wort chiller” – basically a coil of copper tube that sits down in your brew pot. Running cold water through the copper tubing chills the wort. You can buy these online for as low as less than $40 USD. Or you can make your own with parts from Home Depot. If you do use a wort chiller, you’ll have to sanitize it completely before immersing it in your freshly boiled wort. Most home-brewers simply put it in during the final 15-20 minutes of the boil to sanitize it.

4) Pitching the yeast. Once you’ve chilled that thick, sweet nectar down to 70-75 degrees, you’ll have to transfer it to your fermenter. If you are fermenting in a plastic bucket, you can just pour it in (slowly, so you don’t get too much of a head). If you are fermenting in a carboy, you will need to use a large funnel. Make sure that everything that touches the wort – fermenter, funnel, anything else.. is totally sanitized.

With your wort safely into the fermenter, you are now ready to pitch the yeast. Sanitize the pack that the yeast came in and cut it open with sanitized scissors. Then just slowly pour it in. As soon as the yeast is poured in (“pitched”), close the top of your fermenter and attach an airlock.

Now put your fermenter full of fermenting beer into a dark place that’s not too hot and not too cold (you want to ferment between about 68 – 75 degrees F.). I use a coat closet.

Voila! You’ve brewed your first batch of beer!

In about two weeks we’ll bottle it…

Equipment 101: the basics

So, you’ve decided that you want to give this home-brewing thing a try, but you don’t want to spend a fortune on special equipment. And even if you had a fortune to spend you wouldn’t know where to start.

Here’s my rundown on the very basics of what you need to start home-brewing (without spending a fortune):

Cooking surface: You need a cooking surface (stove) capable of maintaining a boil on six gallons of liquid for up to 90 minutes. The main considerations are first that for one part of the process you need to be able to maintain the temperature of your brew at around 155 deg. F., which means that you need to be able to control lower temps (for this reason brewing in a caldron over an open fire probably isn’t your best option). The second consideration is that for a later step in the process you’ll want to bring your home-brew to a boil as quickly as possible and then maintain that boil for 60-90 minutes, depending on your recipe, which means that you need power.

Most home-brewers use either a kitchen stove or a propane burner of some kind. In the past I’ve used my kitchen stove (until my wife refused to let me cook in the house any longer), and a Coleman 2-burner propane camping stove. I currently use a propane turkey fryer.

The main issues with brewing in my kitchen were that I’d basically tie up the stove for 3 hours (inconvenient), the house would smell like hops for days after (not an issue for me, but my wife didn’t like it), and the place was all messy with sticky, unfermented beer from the incidental slops that accompany any other kind of cooking. Also, the kitchen stove heated very slowly, which meant that I’d spend the better part of one hour just waiting for my 5-6 gallons to come to a boil.

The camping stove worked okay ($55 from Walmart). I was out in the garage so there were no issues with tying up the kitchen or smelling up the house. However, I had the same problem with time required to bring my beer to a boil. Especially in the winter, since I had to crack the garage door open for ventilation, it could take almost two hours to achieve a boil.

The turkey fryer works beautifully ($30 from Walmart). It’s got good enough control that I can hold 155 deg. F for “steeping”, and then bring 5+ gallons to a boil in under 20 minutes. Most models, including mine, come with an automatic shut-off timer: the thing shuts itself off after 15 minutes unless you press a button or turn the dial back. Not a bad thing. It just means that you can’t “multi-task” as easily while boiling.

Turkey fryer: cooking surface and brew-pot in one, easy purchase...

Brew pot: You need a cooking pot large enough to accommodate five gallons of liquid at a boil. And already we’re embroiled in home-brew class struggle: stainless steel or aluminum?

The home-brew bourgeois standard is a 7 or 9 US gallon stainless steel brew pot. The problem is that these can be a little spendy. The guys who sell these will tell you that only by brewing in stainless steel will you ever achieve anything even remotely drinkable (pinky finger fully extended, of course). But I beg to differ: for the purposes of the casual amateur home-brewer and this website, aluminum works beautifully.

The best is a pot with 6 or 7 gallon capacity. This gives you a bit of headroom so that you can truly boil a full 5 gallons of wort* (6 gallons would be even better, to compensate for boil-down) without boiling over and making a mess of your kitchen or garage floor.

My first brew pot was a 7 US gallon aluminum pot meant for steaming seafood that I picked up new at Target for US $25. I brewed many awesome batches that got many friends fully hammered with that pot until I bought my turkey fryer which came with its’ own pot. Now I have two 7 gallon aluminum pots.

Aluminum pots with 7-9 gallon capacity or greater are easy enough to find at department stores. Like I said, most turkey fryers come with pots, so if you go the turkey fryer route, you’ll end up with a brew pot automatically. Finally, whether you’re okay with aluminum or prefer to hob-nob with the stainless steel crowd, you can find all manner of used and new brew pots online in popular online marketplaces like Craigslist.

Fermenter: You need something to ferment your beer in that can be made air-tight and that has enough room at the top so that five gallons of wort can ferment without too much “blowback” (when wort begins to ferment, it generates a lot of foam and bubbles that can be a problem if you don’t have any space at the top of your fermenter).

The home-brewing standard is a 6-gallon “carboy” (a big glass jug, like the ones you see on water coolers). You can find these used online for very cheap. New, they’ll cost between $30 and $40. (Many brewing supply stores carry 5-gallon carboys, too. I’d advise paying the extra cost and going with a 6-gallon in order to allow for blowback.)

6 gallon carboy

Airlock & Cap

If you’re on the cheap, you can use a 6 or 7-gallon food grade plastic bucket. My first few batches were fermented in a plastic bucket from Walmart. The standard orange buckets from Home Depot work perfectly well, too.

Whether you’re fermenting in a carboy or a bucket, you’ll need an airlock. My advice is to just buy an airlock from a brewing supply store (they cost about $1.00 each). If you’re using a carboy you’ll need a cap to hold the airlock (also at the brewing supply store.  Also about $1.00. See the picture on the left.).

If you’re using a bucket, you’ll need a rubber stopper with a hole in the middle to hold the airlock (brewing supply store), and you’ll need to drill a hole in the lid of your bucket a millimeter or two larger than the small end of the rubber stopper, so that you can fit it in and achieve an air-tight seal.

Bottles: You need enough bottles to hold five gallons. There’s some variation that can occur during the hand bottling process, but basically you can estimate about 42 12-oz. bottles per 5 gallon batch. There are three main ways to get bottles:

bottles ready to be filled with bubbly, golden nectar of the gods

• 1) Buy empty bottles from a brewing supply store. The down side is that it costs money. Who wants to buy beer bottles with no beer in them?
• 2) Save bottles. Save your glass beer bottles, and ask friends to save theirs for you, too. It’s a good excuse for buying beer by the whole case (24 bottles: 2 cases = enough bottles to bottle one batch). Just make sure that you don’t buy/save the twist-off cap style because you can’t re-cap them. You can also bottle in plastic soda bottles (save the screw-off cap). I rarely buy beer these days, but when I do I always buy with the bottle in mind.
• 3) Dumpster-dive. This is my main strategy: I just go to the glass recycling bin near my house and poke with a long stick through the brown glass bin. I prefer “New Belgium” bottles (Fat Tire, etc.) because they accept standard “blank” caps easily and because the labels soak off easily. Check the local laws in your community before dumpster-diving, though, because it may be illegal to “steal” bottles that technically belong to the company that owns the recycling bin.

Miscellaneous: Other things you’ll need include…

• “blank” bottle caps and capping tool– bottle caps that have not yet been used (get at a brewing supply store). Usually come in 100 packs. Capping tool: special tool for crimping black caps onto bottles. Costs about $15 at a brewing supply store.
  

  capping tool & "blank" bottle caps

• About 3 feet (1 meter) of 3/8 in. (1 cm) diameter clear plastic hose (Home Depot, Lowes, or a brewing supply store) for siphoning.
• Miscellaneous buckets and old towels. I always keep a couple of extra buckets and some old towels onhand as I’m brewing.
• Sanitizing solution. Iodine sanitizing solution is by far the easiest to use. 2 tablespoons of iodine in 5 gallons of cold water is the formula (note: this solution will tarnish jewelry, especially silver). Use it to sanitize your brewing equipment (more on this in later posts): basically you dunk whatever it is you’re sanitizing in and then let it air dry. The surface needs to be wet with solution for 2 minutes in order to be sanitized.
• Kitchen measuring cups and measuring spoons.

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This is the basic equipment that you’ll need to brew extract-based ales. Start here and you’ll end up with beer. Do it right, and you’ll end up with beer good enough to impress your friends, and certainly good enough to get good and wasted (drink responsibly…)

Ready to take it to the next level? Watch for part two, coming soon…

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*”wort” is the technical name for beer that has not been fermented… yet.