Bottling Beer

My first batch of brew was finished with its time in the secondary fermenter. It was a deep brownish color, but since it is my first ever batch of any brew, let alone amber ale, I don't have a frame of reference for what it should look like. It was smooth on the surface with nothing floating in it, and no froth on the surface. A few times the airlock bubbled as I was moving it.

I siphoned it into a large bucket with a spigot at the bottom. It was very close to five gallons, which was what the recipe said I should get. It was about a pint short, but I added a pint of water with the bottling sugar. I stirred it in, and then took it to the table where the clean bottles were waiting.

I made a big bowl of disinfecting solution. This is basically water with some iodine added to make it germicidal. It is also non-toxic to humans, so you don't rinse after you use it. I rinsed each bottle with disinfecting solution before filling it with the brew.

Next came the capping. I made sure that the bottles were from beer that had non-twist ops. The top of the bottle is threaded slightly on twist tops, and I sort of think that the seal might not be complete. I don't want to take any chances on my beer spoiling in the bottle, after all the work I put in. The caps are bulk-packaged, and so I put a cap on each bottle and sealed it with a capper, which crimps the cap tightly in place.

Altogether, I spent about three hours with siphoning, cleaning, bottling, and capping. The yield was fifty bottles, and a splash or two at the bottom of the bucket which I threw away. The time in bottle before drinking is supposed to be about two weeks, longer if I want the hops to mellow more. I didn't mark any day on the calendar, but I just have to remember that it will be ready on Valentine's Day, which is fifteen days away.

After the secondary was empty, I transferred the brown ale from the primary, where it will stay until next Friday. I'm drinking commercial brews now, emptying and saving bottles for future use. I already have my next fifty bottles stored away, and I should be able to severely decrease my purchases of commercial beers.

This morning, I got ready to brew a red ale, but the instructions say it will take over three hours, so I'm going to wait until the evening to start on it. The process is more involved than the brown ale, which is just a bit more complicated than the amber ale. It also sits in the fermenter twice as long, so I will have to bottle it about the same time as the amber comes ready. Then it wants to be in the secondary for twice as long, meaning I will have to wait three weeks to start a new batch, or buy another secondary.

So all told, I have invested three hundred for the beginning kit, which included the ingredients for the first batch. After that, there was eighty bucks for the stainless steel kettle, and thirty more for another set of ingredients. Then I spent ten bucks on miscellaneous utensils, and forty for a tank of propane. Finally, I spent forty more on a spigot for the bottling bucket and the ingredients for red ale.

So, add it all up, and figure a yield of six cases of beer. That means that I have spent five hundred dollars to buy six cases of beer. It's kind of funny when you look at it. Not to mention the time involved. Anyway, at thirty dollars a case of beer, which is what you pay in the store, I will have made one hundred and eighty dollars worth of beer. If you subtract one hundred dollars for the ingredients, the entry cost is right at four hundred.

The ingredients for two cases of beer cost half as much as the two cases of beer, on sale at the supermarket. I figure that I will have to make fourteen batches of beer to break even on the hobby. Actually, the fourteenth case will be right at the edge of profitability, but factoring in the unseen costs such as travelling to get ingredients, I won't celebrate until I am drinking the first bottle of the fifteenth batch. Until then, it has to be a labor of love.