A few weeks pass, and the humble wort that we've made has now magically transmogrified into the most precious substance--- beer! We returned to Brewer's Apprentice to bottle our hand-crafted libations to bring home.
Our brews came out in cold pressurized cylinders containing our baby brews and were hooked up to the bottling machine. The staff gave us a run-down of the process. The key is to work fast and methodically, because you lose precious carbonation the longer the beer sits at room temp.
Foreground is the cylinder containng our IPA. Note the condensation almost to the top, indicating the level of the contents.
Before we began, we first had to prepare the bottles. We had arranged to use 22-oz bottles for the Celebrate IPA and H. Marzan brews, and 12-oz bottles for the B. Trippel. The bottles undergo a good hot wash and are dried.
This is the machine for cleaning/ sterilizing the bottles. Each cycle is roughly ten minutes. If you're reusing your bottles, it helps to rinse them out after use and air-dry them, upside down.
After the hot wash, they are dried on these bottle trees. These do get unstable and you have to pay attention to how you place and remove the bottles.
So how does this bottling machine work? The bottle is placed inside the machine, with the nozzle/delivery tube inside the bottle. There is a switch that has four functions: seal, unseal, start flow and stop flow. After applying the seal, you start filling the bottle up to almost the top, then stop the flow. Let it rest for five seconds or so, depending on the level of carbonation the beer has. Then you turn off the seal and take the bottle out.
It is easy to let your attention wander during this process, resulting in suboptimal beer. Too little an amount of course uses up more bottles. Spilling/ overfilling is a waste of good beer. Removing the seal too early will cause the beer to foam up and overflow, and you end up with a half-filled bottle. Unsealing it too late slows down the bottling process and the rest of the beer gets warm.
The next part is the capping, which we all did manually. I think we capped something like 500 bottles this morning!!!
Bottle caps and the capper device. I was surprised that the process is not more sterile.
So that's really it... bottling was rather easy, but rather laborious. We decided beforehand to divide the responsibilities so there was an even flow of clean bottles to fill, and filled bottles to cap and label. Brew App was nice enough to suply us with yet more complimentary bottles from past customers and our crew was buzzed and happy. Having overindulged this time around, I do plead guilty to mislabelling a few bottles here and there.
Brewers App recommends that you keep your beer at room temp for two weeks before enjoying them. This allows the carbonation to develop, and we did notice a difference between the zero-week, one-week and two-week mark.
And so was it worth it???? Absolutely. The IPA we had displayed a rich, toasty and vibrant flavor and had the right amount of hops without being overpowering. I find that making beer is quite a lot like making bread. The freshness is very distinct and we enjoyed how the beer matured over time and the flavors melded together, like a real living thing. Definitely a large difference from mass-market beer, where the contents rarely vary from bottle to bottle, from day one to day 365.
Yay, the beers are coming home!
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