Lagers take about 3 months to condition while ales only take a week or two.

This time requirement is the main reason everything I have made so far has been an ale, along with the fact that it would require another 3 or 4 cases of bottles.

We bottled the sparkling ale Sunday and I went ahead and brewed the lager last night.  This way I have something to drink while I wait.

The ale, or sparkling beer, as I decided to call it, will be ready around the 27th.  The lager should be ready for bottling this weekend, so I will probably buy bottles from my local homebrew store tomorrow.

In case you are keeping track, the sparkling beer was BEER dad brew #14 and red lager is #15.

Laura and I brewed Amber Wheat beer last weekend and bottled it Thursday. It will be ready to drink early next week.

Both the brewing and bottling took place in the middle of a busy schedule so we did not have time to take pictures of either process. It wasn’t any different than any of the other 10 times we brewed beer. I am leaning towards another Porter for our March brew.

Kaden will be 11 months old in a couple weeks and recently caught his first cold. He’s added cheerios and other small crunchy items to the list of food he likes to eat.  BEER mom has more on that and what he’s been up to on his site.  Here is a video of him munching on multi-grain Cheerios.

My porter now gets to condition for about a week before I raid it. You could drink some now, but it would be too sugary to enjoy. It will end up almost exactly 5% abv and slightly darker than the picture a few posts below.

I will be beta tasting the bock later this week and will be researching how to make a good wine because my and BEER mom’s 2nd anniversary is just around the corner.

My amber bock will be about 6% alcohol when it’s ready.

We ended up with 72 bottles, but opened one to take the ending gravity to determine the alcohol content.  The bitter ended up darker than I thought it would, but I was aiming for an amber color anyway so I guess that counts as a success.  It is just over 5% alcohol, which is fairly strong compared to other pale ales.  It is light brown in color and seems to have a lingering aftertaste like the coffee beer.

Laura (BEER mom to those of you who are new to the site) was taking a nap most of the time, but capped the first few bottles and then really helped by feeding the baby while I filled the rest. (Feeding him is my job on weekends but we were in a hurry to get to the Riverfest.)

We ended up with just under three cases and extremely dark beer with which to fill the bottles. This time the beer was a very dark brown color (near black) but rightly so since it was made with 1/4 of the volume being coffee.

As usual, it is back in the basement for another 5 or 6 days. Then I will begin moving it 12-18 bottles at a time to the fridge for conditioning and drinking. I decided the bottles of wheat beer that tasted best were those that sat at 70°F for the extra week rather than those that were moved immediately to the fridge.

Kaden is also doing well. The picture above is him deep in thought about whatever pimps think about. Bitches I suppose.

We had a rough first few nights with him, because waking up every 3 hours wasn’t something we were used to. He also didn’t like something Laura ate so we quickly learned about the most useful parenting secret – mylicon drops.

He’s sleeping fine now and had his first doctor’s appointment yesterday. There are more pictures of him after the bottling pictures.

How to bottle beer

I’ve already talked about how easy it is to make beer, and bottling is no different. You typically need 2 1/2 cases of bottles for bottling time (if you are making a 5 gallon brew) ± another 4 – 6 depending on how full you fill them.

The first and most important step when bottling is having everything sanitized and prepared before you begin.

My collection of bottles was slowly getting smaller, so I picked up another case of them last weekend. The bottles are by far the most expensive part of brewing beer (if you don’t try to market the beer), so it’s generally a good idea to reuse them and have others collect as many as possible.

We used a one step sanitizer that we purchased from our homebrew store to get the bottles ready for priming. They are other ways to sanitize them, this just happens to be the method we use.

While I was sanitizing them, BEER mom primed them with 1 tsp of corn sugar each. This is so the yeast has something to feed on while sitting in the bottle (sometimes called secondary fermentation) and makes it so the beer is fizzy and carbonated when opened.

She primed about 68 bottles because we were not sure how many we would need. Next we got the caps ready by sanitizing them, prepared the siphon hose and bottling wand, and I brought up the fermenter from its resting place in the basement. Again, you can tell when the beer is ready to be bottled because the bubbling in the airlock begins to slow.

No bubbles means it’s ready to go.

Next I pried off the lid and saw that the beer did in fact look different than before. I suppose it could be a scary site to some (Laura said the coffee beer looked like poo had been smeared around the edges), it also smells a lot like beer at his point too.

Once the lid was off we needed to work fast to bottle it. I already had the siphon hose prepared and a pot ready to catch any mess I made. As with the other times we bottled beer, I filled the bottles, handed them to Laura, and she capped them.

We set the fermenter on the counter and the bottles on the floor so gravity could do most of the work filling the bottles. This is what the bottling wand looked like.

The wand is made so when beer will flow through when placed in the bottom of a bottle. When the bottle is full you pull it out and the flowing stops. You usually need to leave space at the top of each bottle incase it foams when being filled, and so the bottle has a place for the CO2 to go once they become pressurized.

We ended up with a lot of beer once we finished filling everything. 70 bottles in all because some were more full than others.

As with the other brews, the next step was storing them at approximately 70°F away from light. They are in our basement for the next few days; after this they will be moved into the fridge. I’m not sure how I am going to get them all to fit in there though with Kaden’s bottles and our food.

Once again I would like to emphasize that making your own gives you a lot of beer…

I called my brother after making this batch because he likes wheat beer and I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them. I’m sure someone will come help me drink them.

The final thing we did before heading to bed was put away all the supplies and clean the fermenter. Once you get all the beer out there is usually a little sugar and yeast still in the bottom (the sediment). This is how that looks.

I’m sure this could be used for cooking, but I don’t plan on trying. In 5 – 7 more days I will try one of my wheat beers though. I will share how that turns out.

As promised, here are the most recent pictures of Kaden.

I rinsed and sterilized each of my bottles, which took about 30 minutes. Then we gave each one 1 tsp of corn sugar.

Next, I opened the fermenter and I hooked up the siphon hose so I could began bottling. I expected to see a more vibrant amber color when opening it, but the ale looked more brown than red. It still had a lot of the sugar and yeast in it, but should clear as it conditions. This is what I saw last night.

When I was filling the bottles I got a glimpse of what it might look like when it’s done next weekend. When I bottled the Coffee Beer it was semi-dark brown, but turned darker as it conditioned. The Amber Ale was actually light in color as it was going through the hose, but should turn dark red by the time it is ready.

I filled 61 bottles and BEER mom capped them. Then she moved the bottles into the cases and cleaned a lot of my mess while I was picking up my supplies.

The beer should be ready by next weekend, but gets to condition in our our basement for a few days first. I will be moving it to our fridge Wednesday or Thursday. Tonight BEER mom and I will be brewing some cherry chream soda, so expect pictures from that tomorrow.

Once everything was sanitized we primed each bottle with a teaspoon of corn sugar, then she handed them to me one by one. I filled them and handed them off to her to be capped, and this time I actually had enough bottles, so we didn’t have to get creative.

The batch made 63 bottles, which are now conditioning under our bar until it’s time to move them to the fridge. The recipe says they will be ready after a week, but I plan to wait at least two before seeing how they turned out.

Photos from bottling night below.

Fermenter w/ bubbling airlock

Sanitized bottles

Filling the bottles

Bottles ready for capping

BEERmom capping the brew

Capped and ready for conditioning