Bottling Time is Here

Well it has been a long wait, but worth it...

I pulled the carboy from the refrigerator, and carefully put it on the counter. I got out a clean steralized 6 gal. bucket so I can rack the beer off the sediment.

I took out a small saucepan and added 1 cup of water and brought it to a boil. Once it was boiling I added 1/2 cup of corn sugar (a.k.a. Dextrose) and stirred it to make sure it did not burn.

I racked the beer into the clean bucket, and slowly added the sugar water to the beer. The sugar water is addedd so that once bottled the yeast that still remains in the beer will feed on the new sugar, and create the carbonation while the beer is in the bottles.

After the beer was racked off the sediment I took one final gravity reading, and the beer is at 1.010 SG.

While all this was going on the bottles were being steralized. Now we are ready to bottle. I moved the bottling bucket up on the counter, and started another siphon.
The wife was filling the bottles, and I was capping them with a new two lever capper the wife got me for fathers day. This batch made 2 cases + 7 bottles of the Loving Brau Oktoberfest beer.

I then put all the bottles in a corner, to warm up, so the fermentation could re-start. I will put the beer back in the frige tommorrow. I have adjusted the frige back to normal tempurature so it is now at 45 degrees. The beer should sit in the frige for another week, and then it should be ready to drink.

I poured the last leftover bit of beer into a clear glass so I could look at the clarity, and admire it. The beer is almost completly clear, with just a hint of cloudyness. This is probably from the last bit of sugar that was added. This should finish clearing nicely in the bottle.

As for the taste, well of course you got to test it, I sampled the last little bit of beer that I was admiring for clarity, and aside from being flat, tasted very nice.
The color is a nice Dark Amber color, and once carbonated should have some very nice bubbles too.

Next week I will open a bottle and test it to see if it is ready. Next step is to print some labels for the bottles. Talk to you next week.

Final stage of Lagering

Howdy folks,

The beer is at the final stage of lagering, Chill-proofing, and I have been cranking the temp down in the fridge. Current temp is 35-39 degrees, I am hoping to get it down to under 32 degrees F.

The reason I am doing this is to reduce Chill haze. Chill haze is Haze caused by precipitation of protein-tannin compounds at cold temperatures. Does not affect flavor. Reduce proteins or tannins in brewing.

chill-proofing = Cold fermentation to precipitate chill-haze.

I will be bottling this weekend a week earlier than anticipated, because fermentation has stopped completely, and the settling has just about finished.

I will be buying 60 brown bottles, a capper, and bottle caps. I will go over the bottling process in the next post, I will also give you the Final Specific Gravity.

Have a good week.

The Death, and Replacement of the Refrigerator

As some of you may have read in a previous post, I was lucky enough to find a refrigerator on freecycle that was free, and all I had to do was lug it home from Valrico.

Well in a freak storm, the fridge must have taken a power strike or something, well it quit working :( not sure why it just Died.

We called around to find a refrigerator repairman, and come to find out that those maytag guys are a myth they do not exist. We were referred to Sears to get the refrigerator repaired and they would not even come out to us without paying a 45.00 estimate fee, on top of whatever the cost would be to fix the fridge.

So we called around, and found a used fridge for 60 bucks, with a 6 month warranty.

The new/used fridge is now where the old one is, and the beer is back down to lagering temperatures. Only a couple more weeks till bottling.

Stay Tuned