Bottling - 'Tis But A Scratch ESB

After my beer tasting at the Rhino on Sunday, I headed home and prepared my kitchen for a bottling session. Three weeks have passed since I brewed, fermentation is complete and it's time to transfer to bottles and cap for the last stage of the process, bottle conditioning.

The first thing that needs to be done prior to bottling is sanitizing all the equipment, including the bottles. This part of the process is definitely the most boring, but negligence to do so will in most cases ruin the beer. I just use a combination of Star San sanitizer and water with a bottle brush.

While I'm sanitizing the bottles, I siphon the beer from the food grade plastic fermenter into the glass carboy. This is primarily to filter out any of the remnants like hops, grain and spent yeast left in the beer.

While siphoning into the carboy, I take a sample of the beer to measure the final gravity (FG). If you reference back to the original blog when I brewed the beer, you'd see that my target FG was 1.020. The actual FG ended up being 1.010, which is quite a bit lower. Running the numbers between the original gravity (OG), which was 1.065 and the final gravity, the beer ended up with an ABV of ~6.4%. According to the BJCP style guidelines, this is slightly outside of the acceptable ABV range (4.6 - 6.2%) for an ESB. I saw this coming as soon as I finished brewing as the OG was 0.06 higher than targeted and I didn't trust recipe mid brew and went a little rogue. I didn't gather the right amount of wort post mash, which left me with a reduced batch size, throwing off all my numbers quite a bit.

After the beer is siphoned into the carboy, I washed and sanitized the plastic bucket in preparation of using it as the bottling bucket. I add my priming solution into the bucket, which is a mixture of 2 cups of water and 4 ounces of dextrose (glucose) boiled, then cooled to room temperature. Priming solution is used for bottle conditioning to reactive the yeast and create carbonation in the bottles. 4 ounces of dextrose is potentially excessive for the carbonation level in an ESB, but I've had issues with getting good carbonation recently. Afterwards, I siphon the beer back into the bottling bucket, on top of the priming solution, gently mixing the two.

Now I'm ready to begin filling the bottles. I use the Ferrari Automatic bottle filler, which sounds cool and looks cool, but I would not recommend it. Perhaps I just haven't figured out how to properly use it, but it always creates an absolute mess.

Once all the bottles are filled, I began capping. I use the standard Ferrari hand clamp bottle capper used by many beginner home brewers. Here is where I ran into quite the roadblock: 

 I could not for the life of me clamp a bottle cap onto the 12 Beau's bottles I had filled. I had to carefully empty all of the Beau's bottles back into the bottling bucket, cover the bucket and frantically search for some pry top bottles to fill with the remaining beer. An issue that I could see happening here is oxidation from being exposed for so long prior to bottling, as well as increased chance of bacteria infection, neither of which is good. Once I found more bottles, I sanitized them, filled them and finished capping. I ended up with quite the motley crew of bottles

The bottles are currently doing their thing in my closet, while I patiently wait for 2 weeks to pass and the bottle conditioning to be complete. The timeline lines up perfectly with the Olympic gold medal men's hockey game! *knock on wood*

I'll wait until I try the beer to pass judgement, but I've already learned quite a few lessons after my first all grain brew. First, stick to the recipe and track everything along the way, otherwise the numbers won't match up and it becomes near impossible to replicate. Second, don't attempt to adjust the temperature in the mash before it settles. Third, don't use Beau's bottles!

Thanks for reading!