Sanitising and Bottling

I finally got around to sanitising and bottling at the weekend. Again using the Thin Bleach and Vinegar Method.

I used a dishwasher rack to drain the bottles as before.

Sanitising and Draining the bottles

I had a final gravity reading of close to 1000 giving me the expected alcohol content of 6%.

Final Gravity Reading ~1000

The brew tastes good, if a little dry, and has already been used to successfully baste a roast ham. As can be seen, the cider is quite cloudy due to using cloudy apple juice, this doesn't bother me but could probably be clarified with some finings in future batches.

Finished Product

My growing collection of swing-top bottles proved it's worth. The swing-tops are much easier to remove old labels from and much quicker to close when bottling. The only small problem I had when bottling was that the table I stored the fermenter on was quite low which made it difficult to use the Little Bottler, leave at least 3 feet between the ground and the fermenter tap to make life easy, especially with the longer 750ml lemonade bottles.

All should be ready to drink before Christmas, in the meantime I picked up a couple of bottles of Aspall's Premier Cru and Sheppy's Single Variety to tide me over.

Bottled It!

I really bottled it tonight, all 43 bottles!

This weekend I decided to pick up some more swingtop bottles for my first batch of homebrew. I spotted a few bottles of Flensburger Weizen and Pilsner in my local off-licence. They come in a nice 500ml brown bottle complete with swing tops.

The Weizen was delicious, smooth and fruity, almost sweet. The Pilsner was a little too bitter for me, but maybe tasted stronger because I drank it after the Weizen. I won't be rushing out for more of the Pilsner but will definitely pick up more of the Weizen.

Flensburger - Highly Recommended Weizen

Before I could start bottling I had to figure out how to sanitise all my bottles, I went with a no-rinse solution as recommended on Beoir.org. This is well worth mixing up to save time rinsing 40+ bottles, I'm assured it won't leave any taste. I didn't have a bottle draining 'tree' so used the bottom shelf of my dish washer hung above the bath as a drainer.

I only had 7 swingtop bottles so most of my beer went into Cooper's ox-bar plastic bottles, this meant a lot of hand-tightening of plastic screwtops and two massive blisters.

Unfortunately, Cooper's have changed the size of their bottles since making their Beginner Homebrew videos and I ended up bottling with 1 carbonation drop per bottle when I really needed 1.5, I realised this just after bottling. So after reopening and recapping all the bottles my blister is now well and truly shredded. Ouch.

The Inventory - I'm sure it'll all be worth it

Seeing my shelf stacked with 43 bottles of my own home brewed beer was pretty impressive and has me looking forward desperately for my first drink.

The Amber Nectar

Now that my first batch of beer is finished and bottled, I just need to wait for it to condition, then label and drink. That should give me a week to come up with a decent label design for 'Coach Boon's Shamrock Moon'