Ahhh…it’s been two weeks since I have starting my latest beer brew and it’s now time to bottle. It’s been a busy 2 weeks for me as I have to change the ice packs in my cooler box to maintain a relatively low temperature for my pale ale. But anyway, that’s over and now I am very eager to bottle my beer. I guess when you are doing the bottling, the hard part of the entire brew is over. After this, all you have to do is to wait….again. But this is the final stage. After this, you can drink your beer and get drunk like mad. Remember drinking and driving is freaking dumb. Drink at home and then sleep it off. Perhaps this is one of the best reasons why home brewing is good. Idiots won’t be drinking at pubs and driving home after that.

Bottling in beer talk is all about adding sugars into the bottle and creating carbonation while adding very little alcohol or taste. Everyone loves a gassy beer and most people will not appreciate a flat beer.

First I do a gravity reading. Pretty simple, just fill up the long test jar with the beer and then gently lower the tube thing into the jar. Spin the tube thing a few rounds first and then get a reading. It tells you how much alcohol is in your beer. They have this formula where you measure both the starting gravity and final gravity and you can calculate the amount of alcohol in your beer. For me, I just take this opportunity to have a drink. Realized that this is a pretty dry beer, which is fine by me. Not sure about the rest of my friends though. Not everyone appreciates a dry beer. They need some sweetness. But I think this will be a perfect thirst quencher on a warm day, which by the way happens most of the time in sunny Singapore.

Don’t worry about the cloudiness of the beer. That’s just malto-dextrin. It’s suppose to create more head in the beer. Hopefully, it will start to clear up a bit more when they are in the bottles.

I had arranged the bottles this way so that it looks neat when I do the washing. Everything I do need to be extremely neat or I will freak out. It’s some sort of compulsive behaviour that I was diagnose with. Na, I am just kidding. I am arranging them so that they can all fit into my small washing area and I can wash them in one shot with dishwashing detergent and a hose. Too lazy to wash them individually. Washing is not sanitizing. Washing get rids of all dirt, particles and whatever from the bottles. Sanitizing kills all the germs and bacteria. Oh by the way, these are all amber PET bottles which were provided with the Cooper’s Microbrew Kit.

PET bottles are good enough if you don’t plan to age your beers for very long. They can last up to 1 year in those bottles. If you plan to keep them longer, then you will need to use glass bottles.

A little spray bottler with some sanitizing solution in it. Don’t know why I went and bought a yellow spray bottler though. Yellow is not even my favourite colour. Pink is. Previously, I would soak the bottles in a tub of sanitizing solution. However, I realize that it is a big waste of sanitizing solution since I need a big big tub to hold a number of bottles. Remember, these are 740ml bottles and unless you are planning to sanitize one by one (which would take a long time - we have 30 bottles!), you really need a big tub. With the spray bottler, I just arrange the bottles and spray them thoroughly, ensuring that it reaches every internal surface of the bottle. After letting them soak in sanitizing solution for about 5-10 minutes, rinse them off with warm water!

That’s me sanitizing the opening of the 740ml PET bottles. Make sure every surface is sanitized. Our home brewing process is about to finish, so there is no point in rushing the work now. If you do, you could end up like me, wasting a perfectly good batch of beer because I forgot to do something important. But you must forgive elder folks like me.

Of course, let’s not forget the bottle caps. They must be washed and sanitized as well. Check out the oxygen working (we see them as bubbles) to sanitize the bottles so that there is no bacteria or germs which may spolit my beer. What I would do is to cover the jar and shake the living daylights out of the caps. Then let it rest. Again, wash off the sanitizing solution before use, okay?

All ready for bottling. There is the “Little Bottler” and the carbonation drops which will be our priming sugar. Using carbonation drops makes life so easy, just 2 drops per 740ml bottle. No need to measure the sugar (you know, how many tablespoon), no need to make sure that there is no sugar stuck at the screw top and no need to worry about exploding beer bottles.

Cough drops if you have a bad throat. Or you can use them for priming. Yes, to get the fizzy feeling in your beer.

That’s me adding the carbonation drops into the bottles before bottling. The carbonation drops really do look like cough drops. Just drop 2 per 740ml bottle. You can see that I use gloves because I am a clean person.

I have attached the little bottler to the spigot of my fermenter. All I need to do is to turn on the spigot but there will be nothing flowing. The little bottler works by allowing liquid to flow if the tip is depressed. So, you need to push the bottle up to the little bottler’s tip in order for your beer to flow into the bottles. “Those are not the CDs you are looking for.”

There you go. Do you see the urine coloured liquid in the little bottler? Well, they are going into my bottles and in a few weeks time, I will be drinking them with my friends! That’s what life is all about isn’t it? Drinking yeast urine and sharing them with your friends.

Ahhh…..the finest homebrew beer! And Scott’s Cod Liver oil capsules, for that fishy aftertaste which everyone likes. The best combination. And if you look carefully at the picture, you can see my legs and my bed. You are lucky, once I took a photo naked and it spread like wildfire on the Internet.

View and weep. That’s 28 bottles of beer and in a few weeks time, they will be carbonated and will have mellowed a little, hopefully it will be delicious enough for my friends to ask for more. It will inspire me to make more beer and to improve my beers. All in all, it took about 1-2 hours to bottle all the beer. However, the bulk of the time is stuck with cleaning and sanitizing the equipment as well as washing the fermenter.

I will post pictures of me opening and pouring out the beer. Perhaps that will inspire more people to go and brew their own beer. Truth be told, it’s not difficult. Butof course, if you want it to be difficult, you can. However, relax, don’t worry, have a home brew.

My next brew will be an all-extract brew! Take a look here.