Our first batch has been dry hopping in the secondary fermenter for a week now and bubbling is down to once every five minutes or slower. It could probably stay in the secondary fermenter for another week - but I'm ready to get this batch into bottles and start a new batch.
First step, clean out the bottles.
Since brewing day, I've been working on cleaning out old bottles. Some of them had been sitting around for months and have never been cleaned, so the bottoms of some of the bottles look like used petri dishes. In other words, they were in need of a thorough cleaning. Here was my cleaning process, which was probably overkill:
1. Rinse the bottles with a carboy jet cleaner attached to a hose.
2. Soak the bottles in a bleach solution. I used two capfuls of Clorox per 5 gallons of water. Then let the soak for a week.
3. Rinse the bottles with a carboy jet cleaner. Scrub with a bottle brush. Then rinse again.
4. On bottling day, I soaked all of the bottles in an iodophor solution for 30 minutes to sanitize.
5. I don't know if this is necessary, but after sanitizing, I placed a sheet of plastic wrap over the tops of all the bottles to insure that nothing got in before bottling.
On to the bottling...
Bottling was pretty simple. First, we boiled 3/4 cup of corn sugar in two cups of water for ten minutes. Next, we siphoned the beer from the secondary fermenter into a sanitized 6.5 gallon plastic bottling bucket. After siphoning in a gallon, we poured in the sugar water and then finished siphoning. The sugar will carbonate the beer in the bottles.
We also took a specific gravity reading and a taste at this point. The specific gravity was 1.017. Oddly, it had gone up since the last reading, but that is probably due to an inaccurate reading last time. We also took a taste at this point. It was amazingly good despite being flat and warm. Good bitterness and a heavy hop aroma. I thought it tasted a bit too alcoholic (almost like a barleywine), but Josie didn't think so.
After siphoning into the bottling bucket, I attached the bottling stick and started filling up bottles. One important note here, if you close the top of the bottling bucket, the beer will flow extremely slow. It took me about a six pack to figure this out.
After the bottles were filled, Josie put the caps on.
Thats it. Now we just wait two weeks and the beer should be carbonated and ready to drink.
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