All bottled up and no place to go for two weeks!

Sanitizing the bottles and filling
them with the elixir of life.

It's bottling time and I was more than ready to get this beer into bottles and then wait..........again. Sanitizing is the most important thing in brewing beer. If it ain't clean, it ain't good beer. I sanitized 48 bottles and had to sanitize two more at the end of the bottle filling because, there was more beer! As I was filling the bottles, I was capping them also. I did pretty good, only screwed up two of them. The extra two bottled were the ceramic flip top lids (you know the green bottle ones) so it was pretty hard to mess those up. 

Sanitized caps on the bottles and ready for the capper.

Once all of the bottles were capped. I stored them away and cleaned all of my equipment. Cleaning the fermenter was a pain in the ass but it is one of the chores of brewing beer. So after everything was cleaned and put away, I had a beer to celebrate! My first batch in the bottle and on the path to conditioning and ready for drinking. Waiting two weeks to let the bottles condition allows the beer to settle and mature for the right taste. When moving the finished beer from the fermenter to the bottling container, a sugar water mixture was added to pressurize and add CO2 to the beer for the bubbles.

Capping the bottles.

I have a smashing pumpkin ale that will be my next batch and that I will let sit in bottles until October. Nothing like having a great pumpkin ale for the fall.