UPDATE: Homebrew #1 (Foreign Extra Stout) now in bottles

This past Friday (11/4) after the first day of snowboarding of the year, I racked Homebrew #1: Foreign Extra Stout into bottles.

A few days prior I soaked all the bottles I collected (big thanks to Andrew) in ~10 gallons of water with 2 tbsps of OxyClean in it to get any sediment out of the inside and try and get the labels off. I let them soak for about 36 hours and then took each one and scrubbed the label/glue off with a sponge and used a bottle cleaning brush to get the inside clean. The de-labeling actually went a lot smoother then planned. Avery bottles, for example, would come out of the soak free of labels and with no glue, so little to no attention was needed. However, others, like Rogue, must have been glued on with rubber cement because I had to pick at them with my finger nail pulling off tiny little chunks at a time. I don't think I will be wasting my time with bottles like that if I can help it.

Come bottling day I boiled 5oz of corn sugar in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes. The purpose of the sugar is to add a little more "food" for the yeast to eat, and since the bottles will be capped air tight, no gasses can escape thus creating carbonation. It is important that the sugar water is mixed well through out the wort, but at the same time you want to add as little oxygen as possible, so I dumped the sugar water into the racking bucket first and then siphoned the wort in a whirlpool manner in order to stir things up with out aerating it. Once the wort was transferred it was time to start bottling.

I hooked up the bottling tool to the bottling bucket's racking spigot and began filling bottles. With the bottling tool, you just fill the beer bottle to the top and then when you pull to bottling tool out it is at the right level. Then the bottle is capped and that is it. Chris and I repeated this 45 times until all the bottles were filled.

With a 5 gallon batch I should have technically got 48 bottles, but somehow I miscounted and only cleaned 46, and on top of that a screw top got in their somehow which cannot be recapped. So I ended up with 45 bottles. I also donated one bottle's worth to science to measure the gravity and taste. The gravity was right on point at 1.014 and despite not being carbonated tasted quite delicious. It had some very good chocolaty notes to it.

The bottle filler. When the pin at the end is pushed against a bottle, it lets beer flow.

Filling bottles.

Mr. Bottle Capper

Foreign Extra Stout in test tube

So now the bottles need to condition for 2 weeks and carbonate before I crack one open. They will probably taste even better after 3-4 weeks once the flavors and everything settle.

Patience is a virtue in homebrewing.