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The last step in making beer is the bottling.  After you have checked the specific gravity for the last time, meaning that it has held steady for a few days and the bubbling through the airlock has subsided, you can bottle the beer.  This is now the “priming” step, where you transfer the beer from the fermentation vessel to a priming vessel.

…but first there’s some cleaning to do.  It is important to ensure that the bottles and tubing, etc. are completely sterile.  Remember that th beer could be sitting for months, if not years, before you drink it – limiting the various critters that could get in there, aside from your yeast, is rather important!  You want to limit the soap you add, and you can use bleach or other kinds of cleaners.  The key is to rinse very, very, very well!  You can’t leave any soap or bleach in there or it’ll kill your yeast, let alone mess with the flavor of the beer!

It’s up to you what kinds of bottles you use.  The last time I did this, back in undergrad, we used Grolsch bottles almost exclusively because they were 16 oz and had resealable tops, thus alleviating the need for bottle caps.  This time, we went with an assortment of bottles with the same kinds of reusable tops, as well as cappable 12 oz bottles.  In the image above, you’ll see a few large 2 L bottles, some medium sized 1 L bottles, and then the standard 12 oz bottles.  We’ve been saving all of these as we’ve drank beer over the past few months, so that’s a cheap route to go.  Just be sure that the bottles you’re saving are not screw cap style, as you can’t re-cap those.

This part can be done in various ways, but the kit from Northern Brewer comes with a nifty little siphon doohicky that you put about 6 in into your beer, pump twice, and beer flows from the fermentation vessel down to the priming vessel.

Now, the priming vessel is pretty key.  The “priming” aspect of the beer is relating to a few factors.  One, there’s a lot of “leftovers” in the fermentation vessel that you wouldn’t really want to drink, so we’re siphoning off the top and leaving the remainder on the bottom.  You lose some beer in this, but seriously, you don’t want to drink (or see…) that stuff on the bottom of the bucket…  Secondly, in the priming bucket, we also add some more sugar.  This is being done to get the yeast active again for a brief period, producing a tad more alcohol.  For our purposes, however, it’s the CO2 we care about: carbonation.  The sugar we add at the priming stage gives the yeast enough food to continue some fermentation in the individual bottles, thus providing the carbonation we need for the beer.  It’s all done naturally.

The priming vessel comes with a valve and tubing that you can use to fill bottles with.  Really, once you’re at this stage, things go pretty quickly.  Also, as the bucket dictates, don’t store your children in 5 gal buckets.

For the record, here’s what our beer looks like after a little over 2 weeks in fermentation.  Looks like beer, eh?  Tastes like it, too.  Granted, no carbonation yet, but it already had characteristic flavors of a nut brown.  I tasted it the previous time I checked the specific gravity, which was only two days earlier.  I noticed a change in the flavor of the beer just in those two days!  In some ways, I probably should have left the beer in the fermenter for an additional week, to let it age a bit more and develop more flavor, but if I wanted to drink it for Thanksgiving, it had to get into bottles.  Maybe next time!

In the end, we bottled two 2 L bottles, six 1 L bottles and twenty 12 oz bottles.  Not too bad for $30 and a few weeks of fermentation.  🙂

So, we selected our beer and we mixed all our ingredients. Periodically, however, we also need to check and see how the fermentation’s going. There are a few things that must be done while your beer is fermenting, ensuring that things are going…”smoothly”…

Here’s the fermenting vessel.  Nothing too special about it, except for the little trap at the top that contains water.  The main purpose for the trap is to show carbon dioxide bubbles escaping from the vessel to the outside of the bucket.  If you didn’t have an escape mechanism for the CO2, then you’d blow the thing up in your basement!  But more importantly, as long as you see bubbles, you know  your yeast is making CO2, and consequently, alcohol.

Here’s what your beer should look like, with a nice foam called krausen. This picture was only a few days post-start of fermentation. There should be a few inches of krausen on top of the beer.

You can use a “thief” to remove a relatively small volume of the beer for testing with limited introduction of contaminants to the brew. You could do this with a ladle or anything else, really, but this little guy is well-suited to removing beer and adding it to…

…another vessel that you can test with your hydrometer. The hydrometer is what you use to calculate the alcohol content of your beer, or wine, or whatever. It does this by measuring the density of sugar in a liquid. Since our beer started out as mostly sugar, that means it started at a relatively high “specific gravity,” in this case, 1.050. As the week(s) draw on, the yeast break down the sugar producing alcohol and CO2, thus the specific gravity will decrease as fermentation continues. There’s also a percent alcohol scale on the side of our hydrometer, so you can measure that, too. However, specific gravity is a calibrated system, so you can make adjustments to your numbers based on the temperature the beer was measured in.  It’s very easy to use, basically just pouring beer into anything (like the tube it comes with, but a glass of beer would work, too) and allowing the hydrometer to float in it.  There are markings on the side of the hydrometer that you read, like a thermometer scale, at the point where the hydrometer exits the beer.

I’m posting this after I checked it for the last time and I’ll go ahead and tell you that it ended at a specific gravity of 1.011. You can run these calculations yourself, generally by subtracting the last one from the first one. Alternatively, you can find a nifty website to do it for you. The numbers off the calculator come out pretty close to what my hydrometer told me: ~5% alcohol. The calculator, however, also estimates that each 12 oz beer will have ~170 calories.

In the previous post, I showed what some of the equipment looks like, and the various ingredients that go into this particular beer, a Honey Brown, from Northern Brewer. Now we get to put it all to work!

Remember that, prior to this point, we activated, or primed, our yeast and sterilized our equipment.  I can’t emphasize this enough: if you don’t have sterile equipment, your beer probably won’t taste right.  Many companies sell sterilizing compounds that are rinse-less, but you can always use bleach as well…just make sure you over-rinse the stuff to get rid of any excess bleach.

The first step in this kit is to take some of the assorted grains that the kit came with and steep them in a pot for 20 min. You can do this while you heat up the water to boiling. The kit came with assorted grains (including chocolate!) and a cheesecloth to use, so effectively, we’re just making a giant tea bag for your beer. Not all beers come with this kind of addition, but it generally adds some extra flavors to the beer before the malt even sees the water.

Speaking of the malt, once your water is boiling, you can add the malt to the water. In this black pot, we added about 3 gallon of water, which took quite awhile to boil…but once it does, you can add the malt, which then must be heated at boiling for 60 min. During this time, you can also get a second pot and boil an additional 2 gal (although, I’d boil more than that if you can…) for a total of 5 gal.

Prior to boiling, you can add your hops. They come in different shapes, but many kits send it in a pellet form that looks a lot like rabbit food. They smell like a good India Pale Ale (a really “hoppy” beer), and you can get different varieties of hops to bring out different flavors in your beers. Regardless, they usually go in prior to the 60 min boil, but you can add “finishing hops” at the bottling stage. This kit doesn’t include any finishing hops, though.

As it heats, you’ll notice a foam forming on the top. This stuff is pretty sticky, so it behooves you to watch the pot as it boils (I know, right?). You don’t want it to boil over, ’cause this foamy stuff will overflow into your range…and it’s a pain to clean up, and the smell from it is also difficult to get rid of. So yeah, keep an eye on it – don’t go watch a show or anything! [Note: This particular batch didn’t boil over, but back in undergrad, we boiled them over many times…bad news…]

After you boil your beer (and another pot of water…), you need to wait for it to cool down. Think about that. You are waiting for 5 gal of liquid to cool down from boiling (~212 F) to…um…colder than that (~78 F) so you can add your yeast. This can take awhile. Even in Iowa when it’s 40 F outside, it still took forever, so I recommend using an ice water bath to help cool down the beer faster. You want this to occur as fast as possible. The longer you wait, the more likely you’ll get various critters and infections in there to mess with your beer.

Pretty color! You’ll pour it all into the bucket and then add any additional water to get it to 5 gal. It’s, of course, preferable to sterilize (i.e. boil) all water that goes in the bucket, which is why it’s probably best to boil the additional 3 gal rather than 2 gal, as you’ll lose volume over the hour that you’re boiling everything. Always best to boil some excess if you’ve got the space for it!

Finally, you seal ‘er up and put the trap on the top along with a small volume of water and move it to its home for the next few weeks. We are putting our beer in our basement, which is usually at an ambient temperature of 55 F (so far, even with the furnace running 20 feet away…). Now, 55 F is a touch chilly for the recommended temperature for our yeast (recommends 60 – 75 F or so), but within a few days, the bubbling had begun.

Speaking of “bubbling,” that’s what the trap on the top is for.  It’s got two little reservoirs with water in it that allows for CO2 to escape from the fermentation bucket while preventing other things from getting in.  It’s kinda shaped like the plumbing pipe beneath your bathroom sink.  Basically, in order to know that fermentation is occurring without popping the top of the bucket (assuming you don’t have a glass carboy, which I’m not using presently…), you can see bubbles flow through the water in the trap.  You should see this within 48 hours of adding yeast to your fermentation bucket – if you don’t, you probably need to move it to a warmer place, but thankfully, 55 F was “good enough” for my purposes.

In the next post, we’ll check the “specific gravity” of the beer, helping us approximate how much alcohol is being generated.  You usually do this a few days to a week after starting the fermentation process, and you try to limit the times you do this ’cause you have to actually open the seal at the top, potentially introducing invaders to your beer.