We have bottled!

Last night, Abel and I bottled our lovely carboy of beer. It was a bit of a process, but we ended up with forty-six regular bottles of beer and two larger bombers. I'm pretty impressed with how easy this process has been so far - we've gone from a bunch of ingredients to legitimate beer in only three days of work, totaling about six hours. Abel, hero among men that he is, has been doing a lot of the cleanup since we've been bottling in his apartment. There honestly isn't a ton of stuff to clean, though.

But anyway, bottling! Apologies for the lack of images; none of them came out right. Next time we bottle it'll be better documented.

This was a pretty simple process. We siphoned our beer from the secondary fermentor into a bottling bucket. It isn't fancy, just a 6 gallon bucket with a very convenient spigot on the end for bottling. Siphoning is important because it transfers liquid so smoothly - introduction of air, and thus oxygen, can negatively affect the taste of the final product. To this bucket of beer we added a cup of water with a couple hundred grams of dextrose (sugar) dissolved in it. This dextrose is the last energy source that the yeast will ever get. As they metabolize it, they will create the same carbon dioxide and ethanol that they've always made. This time, however, The carbon dioxide cannot escape. It is confined to the bottle, and much of it will stay dissolved in the beer. This is how home brewed beer becomes carbonated.

Abel and I transformed ourselves into a severely understaffed assembly line. One of us would sanitize a bottle, one would fill  with beer, and one slap a bottle cap on it. These three processes, for all forty-eight bottles, took a bit more than a half hour. We then set the beer aside to age in-bottle for an additional two weeks. During this time the yeast will carbonate the beer and some of the flavors will mellow.

These two weeks will be the longest of my life.

Doubly so because there were strange... white spots on the top of the fermentor. I think these were just clumps of dead yeast, but it's possible that they were the result of a bacterial or fungal contamination. Only time will tell.