99 Bottles Of Beer

With it having been three years since the last time I actually bottled beer, I had to do a little research last weekend when the 2 gallons of Original Sin were ready to undergo the process. If you've been following this blog since day one, you know that I've used both the stock PET plastic-ish bottles that came with my Mr. Beer starter kit as well as Grolsch-style glass bottles. Both styles of bottles presented advantages and disadvantages. The PET bottles are ugly but effective, while the Grolsch bottles are beautiful but don't seal well and end up allowing pressure to escape during carbonation, effectively ruining the product.

Substance beats style, every time.

Oh sure, I could invest in regular glass bottles and a capping device, and I may end up doing that in the future. But for the present, Buzzard's Brew will be utilizing easy-to-clean, easy-to-sanitize, reusable PET bottles.

Yaay(?)

Anyway, there I was, staring at a fresh case of 16, 500mL PET bottles. That's 16.9 oz, or just a smidge larger than a pint to you and me. These bottles, plus the 12, 740mL (24oz) bottles I picked up at Rural King, would allow me to bottle two complete batches. All of the older bottles had been recycled at the county dump - I was starting fresh.

Neither of these cases were air-tight, naturally. So the bottles had been manufactured, placed in cases, and had lived in warehouses and on store shelved, exposed to anything and everything in the air from the environments they had been exposed to. The Mr. Beer kit instructions called for mixing powdered sanitizer with water and bathing the inside of the bottles, but considering that these particular bottles had enjoyed their own possibly nasty journey on there way to me, I wanted to take it a little further.

I dissolved some OxyClean in a sink of hot water, then submerged each bottle for a minimum of 15 minutes. They were then removed, rinsed thoroughly using a faucet jet bottle cleaning adapter, and set to air dry for two hours. The clean bottles were then transported to the Man Cave, where they underwent the formal pre-bottling sanitizing procedure.

Fill a 2 QT container with warm water and add 1/4 of a packet of One-Step Sanitizer (= 1.5 tsp). Stir to dissolve. Fill 1/2 of the bottles half-way with the mixture, seal with lids, and shake vigorously. (Repeat this procedure for the 2nd half of the bottles as well). Allow the bottles to sit for a minimum of 10 minutes, then drain. No rinsing is necessary.

After that, the bottles were ready to be filled. I placed the keg on the edge of the sink, propping up the back end of the keg with an empty DVD case to lower the spigot-end slightly - it has been my experience that the last few bottles of beer will fill quicker, and I don't have to risk any sediment coming from the keg as the angle is very slight. In the past, each bottle would be primed with sugar which would react with the yeast to create carbonation. However now, rather than measuring out granulated sugar and funneling that by hand, slowly, into each empty bottle, I'm using pre-formed sugar pellets, "Cooper's Carbonation Drops". One pellet for a 500ml bottle, two for 740mL. Easy peasy.

The assembly line went something like this. Take a clean, sanitized empty bottle. Add a small piece of masking tape to the neck, upon which is written a code to tell me what beer is inside the bottle. For the beer I was bottling, each bit of tape read "BB-XV OSDB". Drop one carbonation pellet into the bottle, then pour beer from the keg into the bottle, stopping when the beer inside the bottle rises to just above the bottom of the neck - approximately 2-1/2 inches from the top. Screw on the lid, repeat.

Last weekend, Original Sin was bottled and set into the Conditioning Cabinet. Today, I'm bottling Inevitable Betrayal. Next weekend, the former will be moved into the minifridge to begin its' final cold condition, and I plan to brew Dark Ephipany 2 Irish Stout.  More later.