Secret Santa Stout: Bottling

Bottling was so uneventful that I almost forgot to write about it! Which is not to say that nothing happened. It's just that bottling is a tedious process, with none of the joy and discover of the boil or the fermentation.

First, I boiled 3/4 cup of corn sugar in 1 pint of water, and let it cool to room temperature. I put this syrup in my cleaned and sanitized bottling bucket (which had doubled, earlier, as my primary fermenter). Then the anti-fun began. We siphoned the beer from the secondary fermenter into the bottling bucket. I have an auto-siphon, a nifty little device that aims to take the guesswork out of the process. It's easy: you stick it into your beer, pump the insert once or twice, and then watch it go. All you really have to do is keep track of the end of your siphon hose, making sure it stays in place and doesn't splash.

This worked pretty well (splashed a little), but it seemed to be taking even longer than usual. Eventually I noticed that a massive air bubble was stuck in the siphon hose. It was about a foot long, and a thin stream of beer was trying its damndest to circumnavigate it. I gave the auto-siphon another pump and the bubble cleared, which sped up the flow by about three times, but also splashed vigorously.

When you read about homebrewing, the importance of sanitation is the number-one thing they warn you about, but not a distant number two is the important of not aerating your beer after you pitch the yeast. Oxidation in your beer is the same chemical process as oxidation of metal, better known as rust. It's best to avoid that. So I was a little bummed at the splashing but it didn't seem bad.

Once the beer had been transferred to the bottling bucket and mixed with the sugar syrup, it was time to bottle. Here again I have an invaluable tool, a bottle filler, which attaches to the end of the siphon hose. It has a spring-loaded gadget at the end which holds the beer in the tube until you press it against the bottom of the bottle, at which time it gently starts the flow. As I learned, though, you need to start your siphoning with the bottle filler open, or else you build up a huge air bubble, which leads to more splashing.

Overall it went well. Due to technical difficulties, two of my bottles ended up being aerated pretty badly -- I marked those caps with an X. (The rest I marked "S3," on my wife's suggestion.) And I ended up with 47 full bottles and one about halfway full, which was just about the target yield -- and a far cry from the 8-Bit Ale, when I had to dump half the batch thanks to a snafu with my bottles.

Between sanitizing, bottling, and cleaning up, the entire process took about an hour and a half. Not bad at all, although, again, much less enjoyable than most of the other parts of the process. And it led to the worst part of all: waiting for the carbonation to be done. I would have to wait about two weeks to drink my first Secret Santa Stout.