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.

Capsized

Look, I know I get frustrated about small things. Instead of stepping back and acting rational when something doesn't work right, I drop F-bombs. Patience is not one of my virtues. Still, it's gotten me this far.

Despite all that had happened in the course of homebrewing, when I probably overreacted to some things that may not have really gone wrong, here I was, bottling away, thinking that soon I'd have an enormous quantity of beer to drink that I had made myself.

Well, I'm not sure what happened, exactly, and if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of the folks at Beer and Wine Hobby in Woburn, MA, whom I previously described as "fine."

Remember how my homebrewing kit was a gift? When I opened it, I remember my in-laws mentioning something about a mix-up with the bottles. As a result, Beer and Wine Hobby had replaced a box of 12-ounce bottles with a box of 22-ounce bottles for no charge. Fine with me, considering that I didn't have to pay for any of it in the first place, and I will always drink 22 ounces of beer over 12 ounces if given the choice.

First, I filled and capped my smaller bottles. This worked great. It took me a few seconds to realize that the bottle capper took a little more force than I'd expected, but within minutes my 12-ounce bottles were capped and looking superb.

When I placed a cap on my first 22-ounce bottle, I realized something was wrong. It didn't fit. It didn't come close to fitting.

So I got angry. My saint of a wife started looking things up on the internet. She discovered that you can actually cap a 22-ounce bottle with these caps and this capper, but it requires reversing some plates on the capper. We couldn't find any instructions for doing this, save for a cheery "It's an easy adjustment!"

It was not an easy adjustment. It took ten minutes of improvising a chisel out of a flathead screwdriver and hammering away at it. Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal to you, but when I use any kind of tool it's about as dangerous as Nicolas Cage running around with that glass ball of nerve gas in The Rock. You don't want to be anywhere near me.

Only after making the easy adjustment did we realize that the real problem was that these were Belgian bottles, and required corks. Do you think the fine folks at Beer and Wine Hobby in Woburn, MA, supplied corks with their upgraded replacement bottles? No. No they did not. I had several useless caps, and a dozen 22-ounce bottles of beer with nothing to seal them.

I ended up dumping half my beer down the drain. Maybe there could have been some way to improvise a seal on these bottles, but it was getting late and I was getting disheartened. I wondered -- not for the first time, nor the last -- whether homebrewing was worth it.

There would only be one way to answer that question. I had 24 bottles of 8-Bit Ale left. After bottling, they needed to sit for 10-14 days. Nothing to do, once again, but wait.

Keep it bottled up

The next day, I took another hydrometer reading. This time, it read 1.014, which was almost what I wanted to see before bottling. There were two other factors to consider:

• Starting gravity had been high enough that my delta was already bigger than the recipe called for.
• If I didn't bottle that day, I wasn't sure when I'd have a chance to.

Time to bottle!

I sanitized my bottles in the dishwasher, because my dishwasher does have a sanitize setting, and I read on the internet that you can do that. Also, the thought of sanitizing them all by hand made me want to run to the liquor store.

The downside was that this actually took a lot longer than I expected, something like an hour and a half. As soon as I starting running the dishwasher, I set about hand-sanitizing all the other components I would need. And then the Patriots-Jets game was on. I ended up leaving everything out for a couple of hours, worrying the whole time whether they were attracting wild yeasts.

At the time, I thought that this hours-long hiatus could potentially be the worst thing that could happen during bottling. I was wrong.

Boiling the bottle caps

The next few steps were easy to follow. I boiled my bottle caps for five minutes, then removed them with a skimmer. Next, I dissolved 3/4 cup priming sugar in 8 oz water. Finally, I poured the syrup into my bottling bucket and prepared to siphon.

I don't know how most people siphon, but I got an "Auto-Siphon" with my kit that impressed me as much as any basic technology I can remember since the first time I saw carbon paper. I stuck that thing into my fermentation bucket, gave it a pump, and out came a steady stream of beer. The book and the directions had advised against splashing. I didn't even have to try not to. The siphon was gentle as a summer breeze.

Siphoning from the fermenter (top) to the bottling bucket (bottom)

Once the majority of the wort had been transferred to the bottling bucket, leaving only about a half-inch or so of mostly sediment,* it was onto the next step. Here, again, I owed a big assist to my equipment. I had a bottle filler, which was an implement that attached to one end of the siphon. I inserted it into each bottle, pushed it against the bottom, and watched the bottle fill up with no splashing. When I removed the bottle filler, it barely dripped. Even with what little I still know about homebrewing, I would definitely recommend using one of these things.

My bottles were filled and I was ready to cap them. This should have been the easiest part of the whole process. Instead, this was the part that nearly ruined everything.

*The layer of sediment left behind in the fermentation bucket was something to behold. It was a good centimeter-deep layer of greenish-brown sludge. Lots of unsavory analogies came to mind. Sometimes it's better not to know how the sausage is made.