Munton's IPA bottling day

At last, the time had come to get my beautiful beer into bottles. I'd spend a lot of time working out exactly how I was going to do this, so I felt well prepared.

I started off by filling the trial jar I bought on Saturday using a sanitised tube connected to the tap. Using the hydrometer, I confirmed that the gravity was still around 1015, and also confirmed that the beer was coming out of the tap ok - it was cloudy but with no noticeable sediment from the bottom of the bucket. I took a taste and found the flavour very mild and rather shallow, but pleasant none the less. Hopefully with time in the bottle the flavour will develop, but I was pleased to still find no unwanted flavours at all. I lifted the bucket from the floor of the brewery, to the work surface in the kitchen.

Next I needed to add the sugar. After lots of indecision (worrying - thats what homebrewers do while waiting for their brews to do their stuff), I finally decided to add the sugar into the bucket before bottling, rather than added sugar to each individual bottle. This was considerably quicker and easier, and some research had reassured me that a gentle stir would not bring up the sediment from the bottle of the bucket. I weighed out 80 grams of glucose. This might be be slightly preferable to granulated sugar in terms of flavour but it is unlikely to be noticeable with such a small amount. In all honesty, I used it as it came with the beginners equipment I was given. I used 80 grams rather than the 85 recommended partly because by beer was already above the target gravity (and so slightly over sweet) but this also matched some recommendations from the web. I added the glucose to a jug, and poured on freshly boiled water - just enough to cover it. With a quick stir it was all dissolved. I covered the jug with clingfilm and made a couple of holes in the film before placing the jug in the microwave on full power until it began to bubble. This should ensure the sugar is sanitised. I left this to cool for a while, and later added it to the beer, very slowly making as little splashing as possible. I very gently stirred the beer for 20 seconds with a sterilised stirrer. Before adding the sugar, I had noticed quite a lot of clumps of a soft brown substance floating on the top. I hoped these wouldn't be a problem.

Next it was onto the bottles. Thankfully the 48 bottles that Phil had ordered me as part of my Christmas present had now been delivered, so I didn't have to complete the cleaning of all the donated bottles - that can wait for the next batch. I also included 4 of the cheap lager bottles I bought previously, as a tester for using more of them next time. During my trip to the brew shop on Saturday I had also bought a bottle tree, thinking that this would be the easiest way to dry 45 bottles at once. Having constructed the bottle tree (only 5 large pieces) and sterilised it, I filled the sink with water and sterilising solution and placed in 8 bottles. For about the next 45 minutes I continually took out 4 bottles and place them on the bottle tree, and added 4 new bottles to the sink. I always aligned 4 bottles facing towards the taps and 4 away in the sink, and with the most recently added bottles resting on top, so I could always see which bottles had been in the longest. I returned every 5 minutes to swap the bottles, so each bottle got 10 minutes of soaking. With the final few bottles, I also dropped in the crown caps to sterilise them.

I was certainly correct about the bottle tree - what an awesome purchase - I don't know how I would have coped without it.



Once all the bottles were done, I removed them all, emptied the sink and, after rinsing the bottle tree, and proceeded to rinse each bottle in cold water and place it back on the tree.

In the gaps between cleaning, I had finished cutting out the labels I had printed out (using a craft knife and ruler). I laid these on the floor alongside a bowl with a little milk in, and a pastry bush. Between these and the beer bucket I laid the sanitised and rinsed crown caps in a bowl, and the capper which I got with my original equipment. I attached the sanitised tube to the tap again and let this fall to the floor and into a sanitised washing up bowl.



Finally it was time to actually put my beer into bottles. I pushed the tube right to the bottom of the first bottle and slowly opened the tap. The first couple of bottles I filled too quickly, giving them something of a head inside the bottles. This also didn't give me enough time to cap and label the bottles. I quickly found a nice slow pace was best. I also discovered that lifting the tube a little when the bottle was almost full allowed me to easily fill to within a couple of centimetres of the top of the bottle. I also added a clean towel to my setup, on which I placed each just filled bottle. This dried the bottom of the bottle and also allowed me to wipe any beer from the bottle ready for labelling. I spent the next 45 minutes repeatedly filling, capping and labelling. Having everything laid out for this turned out to be a very good idea:



The first 30ish bottles all filled easily and without incident. However, after that, I started to find that bottles would only half fill and then the flow would slow or even stop completely even though the tap was still open. I found this was due to the clumps that had been left floating on the surface of the beer being drawn into the tap. I couldn't see any sensible way of preventing this, so I continued bottling. I found that lifting the tube up a little would often free the flow, or failing that, opening the tap further worked (all be it with the occasional sudden overflow). Given these bottles would now likely have these clumpos in, I decided to label them as such, and put a small "L" on these bottles to remind me which were bottled later in the process. As I got to the last few I added "VL" for very late, as these were picking up quite a lot of the clumps. I even bottled a couple of extra bottles by tilting the bucket up. This were capped with a different colour cap (mostly because I had used the 40 blue caps now) but this was also a useful further indication that these last 2 would definitely not be ones for sharing.

It was a very satisfying sight when I finally had 42 capped and labelled bottles on the kitchen floor.



I took the 4 beers in the thin lager bottles, and a couple of standard bottles and put these in a big black bin in my study. Hopefully, these will be fine, and I can use more of these thinner bottles with the next brew. However, if something does go wrong, at least the damage should be contained.



I must have been on a roll on bottling day, as I managed what I now think was another very good idea. In addition to labelling the last few bottles, I managed to keep all the bottles in the order I had bottled them. I maintained this order when putting the bottles on the shelf in the brewery, so that when picking a bottle to drink, I will be able to tell when it was bottled. This will be useful not only for seeing the effects of the clumps and any sediment that got picked up in later bottles, but also for seeing if the sugar (and so fizz) is equally distributed, or whether it dropped down the bucket while I was cleaning all the bottles. It will also allow me to select bottles for friends and family from whichever part of the bottling produced the best final beer.

If I felt satisfied after I finished labelling the last bottle, I felt even better when I had them all neatly shelved.



Job done. Now we wait...