Home brew is easy and good, Part 2 - The Bottling

In the first part of our how to brew we brewed up a 5 gallon batch of Peach and Cardamom Cream Ale, tweaking a brewing kit from Northern Brewer available here: NB Cream Ale. It's been about two weeks and our air lock stopped bubbling a few days ago. A quick peak in our fermenting bucket shows the foam that rises from yeast gas has fallen back down onto the peaches, time to bottle!



We have beer Technically we have 5 gallons of beer, give it a taste. Missing something? That'd be carbonation. Over the next week or so the still active yeast will start munching on the extra sugar we add to the beer right before bottling. This creates carbonation and that often misunderstood component of a great beer, the head.


Hardware Supplies The beer kits from NB or any other brew supply store will come with the basic pieces you need. In addition you're going to need a bunch of bottles (54 or so 12 oz long necks are nice), a little patience, lungs, and enough leftover muscle from your glory days to work the capper.


Let's bottle


- What?

- Yeah

- Already mentioned but here we check to make sure the foam that's created during fermentation has settled back down onto the top of the beer. If you make a batch without the 4.5 lbs of nectarines that we added and it looks like the batch below, well that's probably not good. 

- Wash your bottles and other implements. This is the only part that sucks. We use B brite as our sanitizer of choice, you can use common bleach and a number of other solutions. 

- We strained out the big nectarine hunks with a cat litter scoop, at least that's what it looked like. If you learn nothing else from us you will learn this; fermented nectarines do not taste good.

- Add the "priming" sugar, this carbonates your brew. Check the kit but this one calls for 5/8 cup of table sugar dissolved into 2 cups of water. Boil this mixture and add to a clean and sanitized 5 gallon bucket.

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- Siphon from the fermentation bucket into the bottling bucket. Start the siphon from the floor then lift the bucket onto the counter. It's just like when you were a kid cleaning your fish tank, only this time if you get some in your mouth it's tasty brew and not fish crap. This isn't required, but it will lessen the amount of sediment that gets into the finished bottle. Don't like sediment? Just pour your beer into a nice tall glass leaving a little left in the bottle.

- Start another siphon from the bottling bucket and attach the bottle wand thing. There's a small stopper at the bottom of the wand that kills the flow of brew when you lift off the bottom of the bottle. The trick is to nearly fill the bottle completely then pull the wand out, leaving about 1" of air space at the top, you want this space.

- Setup your assembly line for filling / capping. If our siphon line looks really dark for cream ale that's because that was actually our Hayward Porter being bottled, our 8 year old photography expert can only stay up so late on a school night.

Fill and repeat until finished. Put a book or something under one side of the bottling bucket to help get every last drop, we used Ashley English's awesome Homemade Living: Canning & Preserving with Ashley English: All You Need to Know to Make Jams, Jellies, Pickles, Chutneys & More, something else may work, but I wouldn't chance it.

Store the bottles in a cool, semi-dark place like your basement for at least one week. This is the toughest wait!

Next up, The Taste.