This is a follow-up to part 1 and part 2 of my home-brewing series.
The final step, as you may have guessed, is bottling the beer. There’s not a whole lot too this: you put your bottles in the dishwasher, then bake ’em a little to sanitize them, fill them with beer via a siphon, and cap the bottles.
It’s a good thing this is simple too, because I didn’t get any photos during the bottling. It turns out that digital cameras require something called a “battery” which needs to be “charged.” Who knew?
To take a step back here, you might wonder “where do I get beer bottles?” Well it’s obvious — you drink beer and reuse those bottles. You’ll need about 50 or so dark pop-top bottles. The labels can be removed by soaking the bottles in your kitchen sink overnight in hot water. You can use a cap full of bleach for suborn labels. But the good news is you can keep your de-labeled bottles and use them again.
Here’s a pic of how the bottles get sanitized in the oven once they’re washed. You just place bottles on the racks of your oven, crank the heat to ~300 F, and wait for 20 minutes or so. This is actually more than enough to kill anything that survived the dishwasher.
The siphoning part isn’t very interesting, you just need a hose or ideally a hose connected to a pump. That part makes a huge mess but there’s not much to it.
Everyone seems to be interested in capping the bottles. This crab-looking thing is the device that’s used for capping. You pull the handles and it pinches the caps on, and there’s a little magnet inside to hold the cap steady. It’s very easy, if you don’t mind a little hair in your beer you could probably train a monkey to do this part.
Important note to my Bay Area readers: don’t use Anchor Steam bottles! They seem ideal otherwise, but when attempting to cap Anchor bottles I’ve had nothing but issues. Usually the caps won’t snap on easily. One bottle actually broke while I was capping and I got glass all over. FAIL!
This concludes my brewing series. Perhaps I’ll have some other topics later if anyone’s interested.