The Home Brew Site

Happy New Year to one and all!

Are you like me and find the bottling of the beer the worst part of making homemade beer. It is the messiest and slowest part of the job. Previously I have got round some of the heart ache by bottling beer in 2l plastic pop bottles. A 5 gallon batch of beer only then uses 11 bottles. Not so bad to wash and clean up.

Now the last few brews I’ve made I’ve preferred to bottle them in 1 pint glass bottles. It means you don’t have to drink 4 pints in one go, moving the beer around is so much easier. But now I have to clean 40 bottles.

Suddenly this is now taking a couple of hours to bottle the beer.

So what can be done about it. Well the method I use is proving very good. You will need two things a bottle tree and a steam cleaner.

Firstly set you bottle tree up, the on I have holds 47 empty bottles, if you are not familiar with a bottle tree they basically hold you empty bottles upside down to drain and dry. When they are full they look like a Christmas tree of glass bottles.

Now we need a little discipline here, when you empty a bottle rinse it under hot water, getting out any yeast sediment, then place it in the bottle tree to dry.

Once the tree is full you are ready to brew. When you are ready to bottle, line all the bottle up on the draining board, power up the steam cleaner. I then squirt steam into each bottle in turn for 20-30secs, at this point the bottle will be too hot to hold. Work your way down the the line of bottles, when you reach the end you’ll probably have to empty the water from each bottle.

Prime your bottles with malt sugar or however you prime your bottles, and fill.

It takes less then 30mins to sterilise the bottle this way, a lot less mess than filling each one with sterlising fluid and rinsing each one.

Just a quick post, I’ve found a neat little way to prime pint bottles. Normally I try to squeeze in a half a teaspoon of dried malt extract into the bottle with inevitable sticky mess on the side of the bottle.

So next time I shall do it like this, take the malt, about 200grm for a 40 pint kit. Then mix this with water to 200ml, and boil it briefly for a few minutes to make sure it is sterilised. Leave to cool whilst you are sterilising your bottles.

Then using a syringe, I use one from my sons Collic medicine, which is good because it has a notch at 5ml. Take 5mls and squirt it into each bottle. No mess and much quicker.

This will also work well if you use honey or anything else to prime your beer.

If you go to your local supermarket you may find a lot of beer kits available, Wilkos is our closest. Incidently they have woodefordes Wherry at 15 quid. Bargain!!! They have Geordie bitter kits at £4.99 which is great.

The only problem with the geordie kits is that they have a homebrew taste. For the different brews I’ve tried this is caused not because of the water but the sugar. Cane sugar, imparts that homebrew taste. A kilo of sugar is way too much for a beer. Now you can use things like candy sugar in beer recipes because you want to add a tangy flavour, but you only use say 100grams of the stuff.

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