I like a good beer buzz early in the morning - and Billy likes to peel the labels from his bottles of bud

The adventure continues. On Saturday Jesse and I bottled our beer, if you haven't followed the saga to this point you can catch parts 1-3 of the home brew saga here, here, and here. So it's been two weeks since the boil and about a week and a half or so into our secondary fermentation. Activity in the fermentation lock is fairly slow and we think we're ready to bottle. I left for Jesse's at around 12:30 and got there around 1:30 or so. It was beautiful but cold when I entered the subway at Broadway and 79th and it was a full on blizzard when I emerged in Forest Hills.

Bottling begins, like everything in brewing with cleaning and sanitization. It's ironic that creating something to make you sloppy requires so much cleanliness. We began with the bottles themselves - they were in relatively good shape from the start. After I drink every bottle in my apartment I rinse it out to keep the place from stinking. Ever my father's son, I recycle the empties for a nickel a pop and a couple cases of empties in the closet can really start to stink if you don't rinse them out so in that sense we have a head start. Jesse's prior brews had relied on donations of empty bottles from local bars which invariably were filled with cigarette butts, gum, and other unspeakable foulness.

Still we have Carter designing labels for us so we've got to get the old ones off and there's a big difference between clean and sanitary. Apparently ammonia is great for peeling labels, but we didn't have any so we relied on hot water and razor blades.

It was sloppy and time consuming, but ultimately effective.

Once the bottles were in an acceptable state we gave them a sanitary bath in bleach and warm water to kill any cooties that could spoil the brew.

As we worked we were ever concious of the swirling snowstorm outside the apartment window. Once the bottles got into their sanitary bath Jesse became possessed with the idea of taking a drive, "Let's get some knishes!" The idea sounded kind of stupid. This wasn't some scattered flurries, but a full on blizzard. You don't drive in these conditions unless you absolutely have to. I pointed that fact out. But as it turns I'm out, I'm as spineless as Jesse is stupid so off we went. As soon as we pulled out onto the streets the guys on WFAN were telling their loyal radio audience not to go out "unless you absolutely have to. YOu'd have to be stupid to drive in this weather!" It was a funny moment and if this were a novel or a movie we would have paid for our hubris with either a gory wreck or at least some sob story about getting stuck in the snow and having our comeuppance. For once we're lucky to traffic in reality. The knishes and hot dogs (wrapped in knish crusts!) were delicious and worth every bit of the journey.

Having fed the munchies we got back to work on the beer. Siphoning equipment, brew bucket, and bottle caps all had to be sanitized. The siphoning equipment and the brew bucket got the customary bleach and water bath and we brought the bottlecaps to a rolling boil for about ten minutes. Cooties be gone!

As the bottles came out of the bleach bath we gave them a rinse using a handy faucet attachment purchased at the brewshop. All you have to do is hold the bottle over the attachment and it sprays warm water at high velocity into the bottle. Since the bottle is already upside down while it's being rinsed it's a pretty quick process.

With our sanitary procedures all taken care of we're ready to pitch our priming sugar and start to siphon. Here's the deal with the priming sugar. The beer as we left it, is now almost completely fermented and alcoholic. It tastes like beer should taste. This is what it looked like when we left it:

The only wrinkle is, at this stage in the process it's totally flat. The trick is to get it carbonated in the bottle. How do you do that? You wake up the yeast. When the yeast is doing it's thing it's involved in a chemical reaction that converts the sugars in the malt extract into alchohol and CO2. Up until now we've been letting the Carbon dioxide escape, but we're going to need a small amount of that byproduct in the beer to carbonate it. So to wake the yeast up we're going to add a priming sugar. We had bought some corn sugar for this, but since had some malt extract left over from our boil we'll use this instead. This way we'll have a beer with absolutely no adjuncts.

The recipe calls for one and a half cups of malt extract.

We pour the extract into a quart of water.

And we bring our extract water concoction to a rolling boil for about ten minutes.

Once the boil is done we dump it into the brew bucket.

Now we're ready to siphon the beer out of the carboy and into the brew bucket where it will mix with our priming sugar (malt extract) prior to being bottled. Jesse has siphoning down to something of an art so I defer to him. Here he is looking every bit the mad scientist as we get ready to siphon.

To get the siphon going you fill the tube with water plunge one end into the carboy and the other into the brew bucket. Since the brew bucket is at a lower altitude physics does the rest as the water seeks it's lowest level, seemingly in defiance of gravity. As the beer comes out of the carboy and into the brew bucket we get our first real good whiff of it and the smell is glorious.

We also siphoned off a small sample of our beer to take a hydrometer reading and figure out the final gravity of our beer. It came in at 1.010-1.012.

The final gravity is the measure of the density of the beer. We subtract it from the reading we took prior to fermentation (1.054) to figure out the alcohol content of our beer. After consulting some charts and tables we figured it's about 5.6% alcohol. This is fairly high, but that's normal for an IPA which was originally brewed strong by the british so that it would keep on the long sail to India. We're not going to India, but we are going to get good and drunk.

Now that the beer is in the bucket and mixed with the priming sugar we're ready to siphon into the original bottles. The procedure is pretty much the same as siphoning into the brew bucket except that we attach the bottle filler to the bottom of the siphon. The bottle filler stops the flow of beer whenever it's lifted off the bottom of the bottle and is good for preventing wastage.

Bottling is a two man job. While one guy mans the siphon the other caps the bottles. You want to move fairly quickly because the beer is exposed to germs in the air now and we've worked too damn hard to compromise the final product. At the same time you want to siphon quietly to keep from aerating the beer and getting bubbles in the bottle. Capping is a fairly simple process. You put a cap into the capper.

Having a stupid expression on your face is strictly optional. Then you lower the cap on to the top of the bottle and bring the lever down to crimp the cap around the top of the bottle.

And there you have it a freshly capped beer.

We ended up with a yield of 46 bottles. I had been hoping for at least 48, but this is fine - enough to share a few with friends and still get good and drunk ourselves.

Once we finished with the bottling and measuring our final gravity we decided to taste the sample from the hydrometer tube.

I never thought I'd be so happy at the prospect of drinking a half a glass of flat beer. The beer had the aggressive hoppy bitterness that is the calling card of an IPA, but also packed a surprising/nearly overwhelming sweetness. We're optimistic that the sweetness will fade as the beer ages in the bottle for the next 2-4 weeks. It should be drinkable in 2 weeks (and I don't think I can wait much longer than that to have a taste), but will probably taste best after 3 or 4.

With the bottling done we took a walk to get some local Forest Hills sushi. There might be a future post about the rest of my adventures on the night of the blizzard. Andru and I had an epic night trying (and mostly failing to hear some amen breaks during one of the blizzard. The story is unfortunately too long to fit into this post, maybe next time or maybe Andru will pick up the torch on this one and grace us with a post.