Bottling my first batch

Well the first batch is all set, bottled up, carbonating and hopefully won't explode all over my basement.  I think the only thing this first bottling experience has taught me is that I need to get into kegging ASAP.

Cleaning in the sink

 I picked up 2 cases of brown bottles at Barry's, and had a couple extra empties from my buddy as well.  Cleaning and sanitizing everything was probably the biggest pain in the ass because I don't have one of those neato jet sprayer attachments for my sink, or a drying rack.  I had to use the boxes the bottles came in for everything.

All in all, however, the process was pretty smooth.  I assumed I did not actually have a full 5 gallon batch because I did not account for boil-off when I brewed (lesson learned!) - one thing to fix for next time.



I boiled up what I eyeballed as about 3.5-4oz of corn sugar in a pot before adding it to my bottling bucket.  The tubing and bottle filler were a pain in the ass to fit over the spigot, but the actual bottling and capping all went smoothly with very little spillage.

  My process was to fill 6 bottles, cap em up and move on.  The whole process took maybe 15-20 minutes.  It didn't occur to me until all was said and done that I might have A) over carbonated and B) not left enough headroom in the bottles.

I worked the googles this morning to double check on the headroom and was happy to find my on-the-fly technique was shared by a lot of folks at HBT:

Fill the bottle with the bottle filler up to the top - when you remove the bottle filler, the amount of beer that was displaced should be just the right amount of headroom

Capping was pretty easy too, didn't have any broken bottles.



First sixpack of homebrew, bottled!



Now I just have to wait 3 weeks and hope this doesn't taste like cat piss - fingers crossed!