Bottling is a huge undertaking no matter how you approach it. The entire process from start to finish usually takes at a minimum 2 hours to complete. My last bottling session was no except.

I usually begin by calculating the number of liters I am bottling, the number of bottles it would require and cleaning that many, plus an additional 15. I have never used the extra bottles, but I would rather have them available if I needed them then having to put the bottling on hold to sanitize more. Starsan is a no-rinse cleaner and saves a lot of time, but still requires about an hour to dry. My greatest challenge is finding places to dry the bottles!

So many bottles, so few places to dry them

The Mistaken Ale had some issues… There were floaties of an undetermined origin in the brew. These exsisted from the start even before pitched the yeast. This leads me to believe they were undissolved clumbs of dry malt extract. I came to this conclusion because I have never made an all DME brew before and I have never seen this strange floaties until then either.

I don't know what these are for sure, but I know that I do not want them in my beer!

I may not know where they came from, but I knew for sure I did not want them in my beers. I mulled over several ideas to keep them out of the final product and settled on cheese cloth over the bottling bucket to catch these lumps as they were siphoned into it. It worked like a charm! I should note I boiled the cloth prior to using it to lessen the chance of contaminating the batch.

The cheese cloth caught most of the floaties

Filled and ready to go I moved the beer from the bottling bucket, which I had primed with 3/4 cup of dextrose which I dissolved in 1 cup of boiled water. Bottling takes a lot of time, but the swing-top (or Grolsch) bottles shorten it by removing the need to cap each bottle.

The beer is primed and ready for bottling

Swing tops are a god-send when bottling beer

Once I got these into the bottles I moved on the task of doing the same thing, 4 more times for the Yeast Experiment beers. Each 1 gallon fermentor required me to to move it into the priming bucket, then into bottles, cleaning everything I used and doing it all over again.

It was quite the pain doing each 1 gallon fermenter, one at a time.

I took a gravity reading for each brew (list in a previous post) and took a small sample taste from each. I take the taste-test to check for contamination but also for curiosity sake. I ended up throwing out the 1 gallon fermenters simply because I was too tired to bother cleaning them. I can just as easily buy more and convert the juice into more delicious Apfelwien.

Taking a gravity reading between filling bottles

The semi-finished product. Crystal clear!

I took the last gravity reading from my Apfelwien today, plus I moved the Mistake Brew into a secondary.

The Final Gravity reading for the Apfelwien is 0.998, exactly the same as it was the last time I took it. The beer read at 1.008 which is low enough for me. I decided to rack it to the secondary fermentor to deal with the ‘floaties’. I can only assume these floaties are undissolved dry malt extract.

A tried one of my Summer Berry Ales tonight too… And its fantastic. It has a mild, but detectable fruity flavour to it. A little more bitter then I wanted but overall I am quite happy with the final product.

Today I bottled my Summer Berry Ale and despite a moment of panic when my hydrometer read absolutely no change in the gravity all went well. It turns out that the hydrometer can get jammed in a wine-theif.

Final Gravity reading was 1.010 giving this beer an ABV of 6%. Two weeks in the bottles and a couple days in the fridge this should be a very tasty (or very awful) fruit flavour infused beer. I should pick up some fresh berries to toss into the glass when I enjoy my first one.