Bottling Beer – the easy and hard way

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Unless you are a full blown factory with production lines and workers in place, bottling beer can be a long, drawn out process. Actually, rumor has it that even with a bottling line the whole “bottling” thing can suck ass.

Anyways, like many other things in life, if you have the time and money, you can make this job of bottling at home a lot easier.

In this article, I’ll go over my old process vs. my new process of bottling beer.

The hard way, aka what most homebrewers do

After you beer is fermented / conditioned and ready to place into kegs, or in this case, bottles, you have to do some shit to get it ready.

First, you need to wash, clean and sanitize all of your bottles.

Next, you need to do the same for your bottling hoses and filler as well as your bottling bucket.

You will either put corn sugar mixed with distilled water in your bucket, then transfer your beer from your carboy/fermenter to your bucket, or you can use corn sugar tablets and place them in your bottles.

Once you are set up, the process goes pretty quick.

You finalize the session by capping then storing your bottles for around a week or two.

Then you clean your gear.

You will likely have brewed 5 gallons. Let’s do the math.

128 oz per gallon x 5 gallons = 640 oz

640 oz / 12 oz (bottles) = 53.33 bottles

or 640 oz / 22 oz (bottles) = 29 bottles

For those of you who have bottled all of your beer in 12 oz bottles, you know how time consuming this stuff can be. However, using 22 oz bottles at least cuts this pain stalking process nearly in half.

The preparation of the bottles (especially if you have to de-label them) takes a while, likely the most time.

Some of you are probably thinking, “I actually enjoy the process of bottling.” Well that’s nice, but I prefer NOT to spend my day bottling, which leads me to my next section.

One more thought on the harder technique of bottling. You can actually introduce an off flavor in your beer from oxidization.

Anytime your beer touches oxygen, you risk this happening and bottling your beer does not allow you to purge Co2 into the bottles….unless you do it IN ADDITION to your normal bottling process.

The easier way

Every brewer is going to need to do some of the same shit, which is de-labeling bottles, cleaning and sanitizing the bottles and getting your sugar tables or corn sugar mixture prepped.

I recently discovered something called “counter-pressure” filling that I am completely sold on from a homebrewer’s perspective.

Before you can use this tool, you have to get your kegging down. I can do another write up on kegging since it’s a whole different topic.

Anyways, let’s assume you have kegged your beer and let it carbonate for around a week or two.

You can now get your counter pressure beer bottle filler, hook it up to the keg and fill your sanitized bottles, then cap them.

The beer is already carbonated and you can purge the bottle with Co2 so there won’t be any oxidization. This will lead to better quality bottled beers.

The counter pressure device I use is called the “Blichmann beer gun.” It cost me around $100 and included the hoses and connectors to a corny keg.  I got it at morebeer.com, check them out I get all my shit online from them (and sometimes amazon).

Anyways, all I do now is keg my beer (a closed Co2 transfer to avoid oxygen and only after I purge the keg with Co2), force carbonate it then hook up my beer gun to it about 10 days later.