It’s been seven days since we brewed our beer so it was time to bottle.  The bottling process wasn’t nearly as hard as prepping the bottles.  To prep the bottles I soaked then for about 4 hours in hot water and then scrubbed the labels off. Next time I’ll buy new bottles as it wasn’t worth the time and effort.

After sanitizing all the bottles and the equipment Julie and I began siphoning the beer from the carboy into the bottling bucket.  Next we added priming sugar to the beer so it will carbonate.  Once the beer was in the bucket it was just a matter of filling and capping the bottles.  We ended up with 45 bottles of beer.  I created the labels using Adobe Illustrator after following this tutorial by Alan Ballard.

The bottles will now rest at room temperature for another week and then we’ll move them to the fridge so they can begin conditioning for 3-4 weeks.

*Side Note:
All my brewing photographs are here.

Tonight Julie and I took a shot at brewing our own beer.  We won’t know for about 4 weeks how it turned out but so far so good.  There were a couple minutes of panic but it went pretty smooth.  The only time we found ourselves scrambling is when Julie was literally reading to me about how the wort could possibly foam over and then of course it did at that very moment.

We got all of ingredients at the Beer and Grow Chicago.  As far as Google knows it’s the only place in the city that sells home brew ingredients.  From the look of the place you would think they sell weed and not beer but I digress…

The basic steps we followed were:

1. Disinfect all of the gear.
2. Boil 1 gallon of water.
3. Stir in 1 can (3.5 lbs) of liquid light malt extract.
4. Stir in 2 lbs of light dried malt extract.
5. Once all of the above dissolved add 2 ounces of cascade variety hop pellets and let boil for 30 minutes.
6. Pour 2 gallons of cold water into the carboy.
7. Add the wort to the carboy.
8. Add the yeast and gently stir.

Next up is bottling the beer in about a week.

The Aftermath: