Bottling the Linthwaite Light

Yesterday I finally got round to bottling my second home brewed beer. It had been about 6 weeks since I first started it going, so hopefully it will come out ok.

I started off by knocking together a new set of labels:



I wanted to make the label a little different on each brew, so while the basic label layout is the same, the logo (shown above) is slightly different. I printed out 6 sheets of 8 labels and during breaks in other preparation, I cut them neatly down to size.

I lifted the brewing bucket onto the work surface in the kitchen and tried to attach the sanitised tube to the tap. I found it hard to put on and came across another useful tip - pouring a little recently boiled water over just the end of the tubing loosened it up a lot, and it easily slipped over the tap then.

When bottling my first brew I found that adding the sugar to the bucket worked well rather than the faff of priming each bottle individually, so I decided to repeat it this time. The first brew has ended up being fairly fizzy - probably too fizzy for an ale, but given this latest brew is supposed to be fairly light, I'm hoping that a similar amount of fizz this time will make for a very nice relaxing summer drink. Therefore, I added 80 grams of brewing sugar to a sanitised jug and added just enough freshly boiled water to cover it, and stirred it until all the sugar had dissolved. Having covered the jug with cling film and made a few holes in it, I popped it in the microwave until it started to boil again, just to ensure it was sanitised. I then left this to cool and later slowly added it to the bucket, very gently stirred all the time.

And then, onto the laborious job of cleaning the bottles :-( Even with the bottle tree, this is still a slow and boring job, but given I had cleaned and rinsed all the bottles when I first got them, I felt a soak in sanitising solution and a good rinse was sufficient for each bottle. Some time later, I had 45 clean bottles ready to fill. With the last few bottles, I also dropped 45 caps into the sanitising solution, and then rinsed them off ready for use.

I took a quick gravity reading before starting the bottling:



I took this to be a reading of 1.010, which surprisingly had therefore dropped a little after I stirred up a little of the yeast a few days ago. However, after 6 weeks, I decided not to wait any longer to check it had finished. Hopefully this wont come back to get me later. At 1.010, this has now reached the upper limit of the target final gravity, so hopefully this won't be as sweet as the IPA.

As before, I setup a nice conveyor belt, of filling, capping, and then labelling (applied with milk of course):



I had originally decided to use about half proper thick-glassed bottles, and half the thinner lager bottles (after none of them exploded last time :-) ) but when I realised I had enough proper bottles to do them all, I decided to just do a test sample of 5 thin bottles again, to further assess them.

Finally, some considerable time later (it somehow took me over 3 hours from starting the labels to being completely finished) I finally had 45 Linthwaite Lights bottled, capped and labelled:



For the more astute of you, yes - I did take this picture before I finished, hence there only being 37 bottles in the photo.

Given the missus and I needed to make room in the kitchen for the imminent arrival of our first dishwasher, it made sense to store all our beer in The Brewery, so with the addition of the Linthwaite Light it now looks like this:



Its slowly starting to look like a brewery. When I get time, I'll be adding the wine and champers we have to the top shelf, and somewhere I'm sure there is some more commercial ale, but for now, I'm pretty happy with it.