First Brew Recipe Guideline Part #3 of 3, steps #16-#17
Bottling, Storing and Enjoying Your Beer
16. Bottling Your Beer: Have ready at least 48, 12oz. Or 36, 22oz. Crown cap bottles that are clean and sanitized. Hint: An easy way to sanitize bottles is to load them up in your dishwasher. Dont use any soap though! The rinse and dry cycles are hot enough to sanitize your bottles. At this point your beer will taste good, but it will be flat. To create carbonation you will need to re-feed the yeast with more sugar. To do this, take one-to-two pints of water, add 3/4-cup corn sugar and boil the water and sugar for 5-10 minutes. You will also need to sanitize your caps. To sanitize your caps boil them in water for 10 minutes. Put the dissolved and cooled priming sugar in your clean and sanitized bucket and than gently rack your beer out of the secondary fermenter and onto the priming sugar solution. When all of the beer is racked you can use the racking cane to gently swirl the beer to help completely mix the priming sugar with the beer Hint: when transferring your beer from the secondary into the bottling bucket be sure that you get some of the yeast off of the bottomotherwise you may not have enough yeast in your beer to become properly carbonated You will need about 1 TBLS. of yeast-sediment transferred over. Attach the bottling wand to the end of your siphon tube, create a siphon and fill each bottle with one inch of headspace. After filling each bottle place a sanitized bottle cap onto each bottle. Do this with all of the beer before crimping the caps on. This will allow oxygen that is in the bottle to be pushed out by the CO 2 while keeping germs out. When all of the bottles are filled crimp on all of the caps, starting with the first one filled. After crimping the cap invert the bottle three times to help seal the cap.
17. Storing Your Beer: For the first week you will need to keep the beer at room temperature to allow the yeast to convert the priming sugar to CO 2. One week after bottling grab one of the bottles and stick it in the fridge for an hour before serving. If it gives up a nice, pppffffft! upon opening than you have developed carbonation. At this point you can move the beer to a colder location. If there is absolutely no carbonation than give Joel a call to discuss some measures for getting your beer carbonated. You will notice that homebrew reaches its prime, depending upon the style, after 3 - 4 weeks. It will be tough for you to resist the temptation, but try to wait two weeks before drinking all of the beer!! I recommend that you try one a week after bottling, than another after 2 weeks. You will note some significant changes for the better! Most homebrews will not last more than a year. Try to store your beer at a constant temperature below 60 degrees and out of the light. Hint: Don't wait until the last six pack is left before you ferment up another batch!! Cheers! If your beer did not carbonate after a week to two weeks there are several reasons that may be to blame. First, after bottling you stored the beer in a cold location and the yeast went dormant. Second, you forgot to add priming sugar. Third, you were too careful in your racking and did not get enough yeast carried over from your primary to your secondary and to your bottling bucket. Dont be a Yeastybeastyphobe! To remedy flat beer you need to either move the beer to a warm area, add priming sugar and/or fresh yeast. Sometimes simply shaking the bottles 2 3 times a day for a week is sufficient for getting the yeast agitated and out of dormancy.
This malt extract and grain-steeping recipe is designed to get you into a method of brewing that I think works really well but hopefully, you will develop your own opinions and methods! It is also designed as a hand-holding tool so that you can go home and get brewing...I still recommend reading the first few chapters of Charlie Papazian's book, The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing, especially the chapter called "Brewing Better Brew". To advance your skill think about a mini-mash or a stepping up to the bat and playing with the big boys and doing an all-grain batch.
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