Sterilizing is probably the most crucial part of the entire bottling process and at this stage you need to make sure you are extremely cautious when sanitizing and keeping this clean. All the time and work it took to prepare, brew and ferment can all go to waste if one little mistake is made. Today my girlfriend and I went through the process of sanitizing and preparing the bottles. First i like to have clear bottles without any labels on them. To do this i soak them in warm water for about 15 minutes. The labels should come off fairly easy but some of the glue but still be on the bottle however that can just be wiped off with a towel. Next we sanitize the bottling bucket and also the strainer and spoons that we will use to remove the whole leaf hops we used for dry hopping. Also we decided to use honey for the bottle conditioning so we measured that out and also boiled it for 1 minute to make sure that the honey was also completely sterile. Lastly we sterilize all the bottles and let them dry inside and out. Once everything is dry strain out all the hops and get the beer into the bottling bucket, add the honey and mix it up thoroughly. We then start bottling by filling up each bottle with 3/4 of an inch left at the top so that the pressure in the bottle doesn't get high enough to where your beer explodes when the top is popped off. I have a few pictures of the process to hopefully give a better picture. Comments welcome, Cheers!
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| Drying the bottles |
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| Removing the labels |
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| Bottling "mis en place" |
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