Bottling Day

So Jan 25th was bottling day.  It is easy to set it and forget it with the wort fermentation and now waiting for the bottles to set up, but when its out and I'm "playing" with it, it seems like forever till i can taste it.  I have been collecting some used bottles and have one box of new plastic screw tops that I will be using.  I run all the bottles through the dishwasher with out detergent and at a high heat.  When the finish I rinse them out with a sanitizer before filling.

Next step is to boil the priming sugar in 2 cups of water and then let it cool so I want to do this before I start with the rest.  Easy to boil, remember to cover it while it cools (you can make a mini ice bath if needed, that's what I did).
My brother in law said that bottling could be messy so I started the process in the tub.

Here is the fermented wort and my bottling bucket.  Oh yeah, don't forget to sanitize everything.  My bottling bucket has been fully sanitized.  I kept the wort in the fermenting bucket because I started another batch in the glass carboy.  (Bottling for that will be this weekend, I may post about it also, but I forgot to take pictures).

This is the wort unveiled!!!  YAY!!! It smells like beer.  Yes I did try it and yes it was kinda good.  If I was served it in a bottle I would not be happy but as my non-carbonated wort to beer creation, I was as please as Dr. Frankenstein.  You can see a slight ring of trub around the top of the wort (trub is the sentiment left behind from the yeast, most of it will be at the bottom of the fermenter by now). 

Getting ready to transfer the wort using my handy auto-siphon.  The auto-siphon has a knob at the bottom so it wont sit on the bottom in the trub, but I held mine up any way.  Slowly siphon the wort from the fermenter into the bottling bucket.

Here is the transfer.  At this time I checked my priming sugar mix and then added it into the bottling bucket also.  The bottling process went pretty well and I must say the screw top bottles were much easier to cap as I went.  A piece was broken on my regular bottle capper which made that task seem crazy difficult until I rigged it up.  I washed my fermenting bucket and flipped it upside down on the counter, then I placed a square cutting board on top (to give it more flat stability).  I then placed the bottling bucket on top of that to give me a good gravity feed.  I filled in a large metal bowl so any drippings would be captured and placed bottles on a towel after filling to catch drips.  Filling was easy, a little time consuming but pretty easy.  Sorry forgot to take more pictures.  I will try to capture some of the bottling process this weekend on batch number 2.