BOTTLING: Buckwheat Cuivrée

My fellow brewer, Mr. Smashton, dropped by on Wednesday evening and we bottled this batch in real glass! I've only got around to posting about it now, though.

My first challenge was collecting enough bottles. Here in Alberta you have to take your empties to a designated Bottle Depot, rather than just anyplace that sells beer, so I have plenty of bottles around the apartment, but I didn't want to try screw-tops my first time out. After a thorough search I put together a motley selection of fifteen bottles that were appropriate.

I had to soak them overnight to remove (most) of the labels (the label on the bottle of Japanese Imperial Smoked Porter proved too tenacious for the chemicals I have at my disposal). I sanitized them all, as well as my caps, Mr. Smashton's capper, the siphon, bucket, and all other equipment with iodophor.

Next, we weighed out the priming sugar which will feed the remaining yeast so they can produce CO2 and carbonate the bottled beer. I used approximately fifty grams of corn sugar, which given the amount and temperature of the beer should yield slightly higher than normal carbonation, around three volumes of CO2 (a typical American beer is two to two and a half). We dissolved the sugar in a little boiling water, cooled it, and the gently racked the beer from the secondary into the bottling bucket so as to mix it with the sugar thoroughly without introducing too much oxygen. We took a small sample during racking to recheck the gravity, which is unchanged since last time at 1.020.

~ 50 grams of corn sugar

Sadly it was no longer that shade
of orange soda when we finished.

We siphoned everything into the bottles one at a time.  Even though having Mr. Smashton there to help made this much, much easier, it's still kind of a messy, involved pain (which is why there are no pictures of this part), especially to get started.  I have a ball valve spliced into my siphon line so I can start and stop it, and this is very handy, but I'm going to have to put together a better bottling system, especially as I won't always have Mr. Smashton to help me.  I lost at least a full bottle to siphon mishaps this time, in addition to the usual amounts left behind when racking and so on.

In any event, once we got through that, it was time to cap the bottles!

A bowl of sanitized crown caps and a wing capper,
provided by Mr. Smashton.

The procedure was pretty simple.  First, place crown caps loosely on all the bottles, then, work your way down the line with the wing capper crimping each cap on.  The trick, as it turned out, was removing the bottles from the capper - once again, having two people was essential.

The loose cap.

Crimping the cap takes little force.

I'm using my other hand to take the
picture.  I needed both to actually
get the capper off the bottle.

The end result!

Finally, we lined all the bottles up in a cardboard box lined with a trash bag and some newspaper (I understand that so-called "bottle bombs" are actually very rare, but to read a homebrewing newsgroup you'd think they were the leading cause of death), and stowed them away to carbonate. Probably one to two weeks and a bit in the fridge, and they'll be ready to drink. And drink them I shall, if only to get rid of the things... We tried a little that didn't make it into bottles (you'll notice there aren't actually fifteen bellow), and it's... Well, the hops didn't make it much more exciting.