Bottling Day

This evening, while everyone else in New England was watching the Super Bowl, we bottled our beer.

After sterilizing everything (again) we siphoned a little out to check the specific gravity: 1.012.  This translates to an alcohol content of 5% or thereabouts.  We were ready!  Since we didn't have enough bottles my husband bought a case of 1 liter bottles with the snap-top caps and gaskets so we cleaned and sterilized those and decided we'd fill those first.  That's 12 liters.  That's a lot of beer.

After dissolving the priming sugar (necessary so that once in the bottles the carbonation step happens) we added it to our bucket and siphoned the beer into it to mix.  (We did taste a little.  Yep, tastes like beer.)

Filling the bottles with a flashlight to see when it's full

Then we moved this bucket up to the counter and got our bottles ready.  One of the more interesting things about siphoning is that if one of you is not paying attention, the other of you will end up spraying beer all over the kitchen and yourself.  Twice.  Heh.  Sorry....the clip is there for a reason!  It was around this time that the conversation went something like this:

Husband: Who's idea was this, anyway?
Me:  Um, yours?  Remember?
Husband:  Why didn't you talk me out of it?

Other than that, there were no major disasters, and we got all 12 liter bottles filled and capped and moved on to the standard bottles.  For this we needed a few more hands so enlisted the help of the 10-year-old to do the capping with the very large and scary looking bottle capper.  It took a few tries but eventually all went smoothly and we ended up with 12 of those bottles and then a half-bottle that we decided to cap anyway and taste it first.

For that, we have to wait 2 weeks.  Then it will be time to chill and serve!