Bottling Day!

Excitement, it’s bottling day for the first brew. It has been a bit over two weeks (which is what all the forums say, not what the can says), the Final Gravity has been stable for a couple of days and the fermentation bucket has been in the fridge for three days crash cooling.

Bottling is actually not much fun - it basically consists of a lot of cleaning. I am using new PET bottles for my first brew, so they should be pretty clean, however they do need sanatising with StarSan before I prime them and fill with beer. It is the sanatising process that is not a huge amount of fun, especially with 30 bottles.

Another suck thing about bottling is how slippery the wet bottles are with the StarSan - they slip out of your hand quite easily when you are not paying enough attention when filling. Did I say how little I enjoyed cleaning the bottles - try adding to this having to wash beer from the dropped bottle off the kitchen floor!

Eventually I did finish bottling my “Caterina Neue 1.0” (my Garage Project knockoff), it was finished with 20ml of Monin Watermelon Syrup (from Moore Wilson) and 10ml of Lebanon Gardens Rose Syrup (Mediterranean Food Warehouse) along with 2 carbonation drops. I realised at the end of bottling that I was meant to only use a single carbonation drop due to the sugar in the syrup, so potentially the bottle will be sweet and over carbonated (or they might turn into bottle bombs - especially the two glass swing top bottles with the dregs from the bottom of the fermenter). I have no problem with a sweet beer, however exploding beer sounds like more clean up... I will have to keep an eye on them over the next few weeks.

Ended up with 30 x 750ml bottles and 2 x 375ml bottles. Not too bad (assuming it is drinkable)