Bottling Day!

And on the Sixth Day, there was homebrew.

Matt, Hannah, and I bottled the homebrew yesterday. It was quite fun :)
Here are some pictures!
Clean Bottles - These were dishwashed the night before, and at this point were awaiting a final bath in the sanitizing solution.







The wort! This is the "raw" beer. The yeast has done its job, and now the beer is ready to be transferred to the second tub, where it will meet the priming sugar.






Siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket. We had already added our dissolved corn sugar/water mixture to the bottom of the bucket. This priming sugar is what the yeast will use to create new CO2 in the bottles, carbonating the beer. This method is called bottle conditioning.







Transferring the beer to the bottles. We used an auto-siphon device, which when fully depressed at the bottom of the bottle, allows a perfect, steady stream of beer to fill the bottle, and as soon as you lift up, it cuts off the flow. It's great!





The first bottle!








Now we have to wait 7-14 days for the yeast to do its thing. I can't wait. The beer we made was a pretty straight-forward amber ale. Since it was our first go at it, we used a kit, which contained all of the ingredients and supplies, everything perfectly measured out, etc. If it's tasty, we will be making a brown ale from a recipe next. If it's not tasty, we'll probably need to try a kit beer again to make sure that we can get one of those right :)