Bottling: The less glamourous side of home brewing

Read any home brewing blog and you'll see lots of posts about beer recipes, grain, hops, brewing techniques and indeed talk about tasting the beer when it's been made. What you won't see so much about is the bottling of the beer. Bottling must be the most hated task of the home brewer. Compared to the fun of planning the recipe and brewing the beer it's just tedious, it's the last finishing step that has to be gotten out of the way before you get to the good part which is drinking the beer.

It has to be done though and this week I bottled my polar beer which I brewed back in January. It's been sitting almost unnoticed in the shed getting nice and cold.

I've developed a bit of a system to deal with the pain of bottling. I put a load of bottles to be sterilized into a plastic box. The plastic box means I don't get sterilizer all over the kitchen counter as it can stain it. I then use a funnel to pour the sterilizing solution into the bottles until they are full. If I'm using swing tops I then close the bottles and leave the solution to do it's work. I then rinse them until there is no smell of sterilizer from them. I don't usually leave the bottles to dry though I suspect I should.

I boil up the recommended amount of sugar with water and let it cool. I pour it into a sterilized better bottle which acts as the bottling bucket. Using a sanitized tube I transfer the beer from the primary fermenter to the bottling bucket.

At this stage I usually need help to move the full better bottle up onto the table. I then attach a bottling wand to the tap of the better bottle. Bottling wands really help with not losing the will to live while bottling.

I get all the bottles and caps I'll need together on some newspaper and then put a bucket under the bottling wand to catch any drips. Then I bottle away and hope that it doesn't take too long.

Usually I measure the final gravity of the beer. This time however I forgot to take a sample before I put the sugar in so the reading I took is wrong. Ah well I'm sure it fermented out and the required amount of alcohol is present. Very precise I know.  

I usually have a husband helper to close the bottles if they're flip tops and cap with crown caps if needed. I can recommend a helper as it speeds up the process and you also have someone to talk to. Some people recommend opening a home brew from the previous batch when bottling and this is also very sensible advice. For more on bottling see Barry's excellent guide to bottling.

I don't know even blogging about bottling is getting to be as tedious as the act itself. So that's enough of that. On to the results of the sneaky taste of the beer. I can't wait to taste this beer when it ages a bit more and is fully carbonated. It's nice and clean with no yeast profile which is what I was looking for. It's malty but I couldn't fully work out what was going on with the malt from the taste I had. I was impressed by the hop profile, it's got a lovely bitter hit just at the end and no real flavour or aroma. All in all it's looking very promising for the polar beer.