Three weeks have passed since I wrote about our brewing… it is now time for the other crucial step: Bottling! This process was mentioned in our instructions as the hardest, and the one requiring the most practice. So of course, we didn’t at all.

First we acquired some re-purposed bottles (namely Grolsch, and a spiked lemonade that shall remain nameless), and cleansed them of all traces of their former contents. Then, we were told we needed to select a conditioner for our beer.  At first we were skeptical of putting this extra sugar in our beer (“does all beer have to taste like honey?” we asked ourselves), but after some advice from fellow homebrewers, we discovered this was actually a crucial step in the process. We needed to add an additional sugar of some type (Honey, sugar water, maple syrup, etc.) to reawaken the yeast in order to carbonate our beer. We don’t want any flat beer, so we did as we were told. We went with the suggested honey.

Then it was time to rig up the hose and racking cane. Thanks to the Brooklyn Brew Shop’s helpful video, we were able to do this, no problemo. Racking cane into the jug o’ beer, just above (but not touching) the trub (the gunk at the bottom of the jug), tube flowing into a run-off container, we were ready to go. We had sanitizer in the tube, all ready for the magic of suction to bring the beer from the bottle down into the pot with honey below.

Until…. we ran out of suction. Oh no! What happens now? Do we risk contaminating our beer with bacteria by doing it the old fashioned way to sucking the beer out of the tube with our mouths? We tried that…. still didn’t work. Upon further examination, we realized that the tubing had been stretched out during it’s life as a blow off tube. Oops. So, with a little ingenuity, we switched up the tube, filler ‘er with sanitizer again, and…. success!

With our siphoning from the jug now completed, we moved on to the bottling phase. This was basically a repeat of what we just did with the jug, only the racking cane was now in the pot and draining into the bottles. By this time we had gotten the siphoning down to an art, but the liquid was flowing rather quickly, so we had some spillage on the floor. Even with that loss, however, the beer fit perfectly into our five bottles, which we then capped and sent into the closet for the next phase of fermentation.

Two more weeks. This wait is killing me. And throughout, there are so many places we could have gone wrong! I just hope this recipe, more than a month is the making, is worth it! I guess we’ll see soon…