Today I bottled my 50th batch of beer. Oddly enough, I got 50 bottles of beer out of the batch. Pretty interesting, huh?
Coincidence? I think not.
Actually, I always get 50 bottles of beer out of a batch, so that is a bit phony.
Well.. to tell the truth, I really got 53 bottles of beer out of it, so it wasn’t all that interesting after all… except that 53 is a prime number. That’s pretty interesting.
Work with me.
OK enough of that. In order to bottle beer ya gotta have bottles.
And ya gotta have a beer bucket.
That is the same bucket that I put the hose into while the beer is fermenting. I use Dad’s Beer Bucket for sanitizing some of my tools. I also have a larger bucket that I use to sanitize the bottles in. Here are some of the bottles sanitizing in the larger bucket.
I boiled the bottle caps and the priming sugar to sanitize those.
Before I got too far along, I pulled out half a cup of beer to measure the specific gravity (0.010) and to see if it was sour. It wasn’t sour. It looks pretty good. Nice, amber color, and pretty clear too. It tastes OK. Raw beer is always a little nasty, but it is OK. I wasn’t drinking any, I was just tasting it. Honest.
The next step was to rinse the bottles out. I sanitized them with the “One-Step”, “No-Rinse” sanitizer that I got at the beer store, and that has Percarbonates in it. Ya. It does. Percarbonates. Scary word, “Percarbonates“. Like…. that stuff is used in laundry detergent! I’m not going to rinse that stuff out? I don’t think so.
I used to use laundry bleach to sanitize the bottles, but face it, even “Percarbonates” sounds better than “Laundry Bleach“. Yuk.
I use my bottle washer to rinse the bottles. It goes on the faucet like this.
When we were designing our new kitchen, I picked out that faucet at the snooty faucet showroom store by going around with my 89 cent aerator to see if the bottle washer would fit their fancy faucets. LOL. They thought I was nuts, but it worked. I can hook my bottle washer to it.
I turn the water on and leave it, then I can simply push the bottle down on the washer like this to rinse it.
After rinsing the bottles, I siphoned the beer out of the carboy into the large brewing bucket (not to be confused with Dad’s Beer Bucket).
That leaves behind most of the muck and slime in the carboy. Here is the beer flowing into the bucket.
I ran out of hands while I was doing the bottling, so I did not get any photos of me siphoning the beer into the bottles. There were some, uh, “issues” with the second siphon, and I ended up getting beer on my shirt….. and on the floor… and on the top of my head…. but I didn’t get any on the ceiling. I won’t go into that any further.
Anyway, here they are…. all 50…. um… 53 bottles of beer on the wall.
I guess this is a longer post than usual. It would appear that I have violated my own 15 second rule ( “If you can’t read a blog in 15 seconds, it is too long”). But for today I have changed the rule to the 15 pictures rule (“If it has more than 15 pictures in it, it is too long”), and I am in compliance with that one.
So there.