Bottling day

Today was gluten free beer bottling day. If you like beer but have celiacs then you need a gluten free beer. Here is the gluten free recipe I used.

Ingredients
7lbs of white sorghum syrup
1oz cascade hops (beginning of boil)
1/2oz cascade hops 15 min before end of boil
1/2oz cascade hops at end of boil
1 packet of dry ale yeast or liquid ale yeast

Instructions:
Mix syrup and about 1 gallon of water in brew pot and bring to a boil. Add 1oz of cascade hops. Boil 45 minutes. Then add 1/2oz cascade hops and boil for 10 more minutes. Then add 1/2oz of cascade hops and boil for 5 more minutes. Put in primary fermentor and add remaing water to get to 5 gallon mark. Cool as quickly as possible to 75degrees and pitch the yeast. Fill airlock and wait until the fermentation stops (at least 1 week) I usually wait 2 weeks and rack to secondary for clearing. I like leaving it in the secondary for about 3 weeks sometimes longer.
 

We tried an easier way to clean/sanitize the bottles this time using the dishwasher on the sanitize option. Then as usual we rinsed all the bottles with a no rinse sanitizer.

This seemed to work really well. The rinse aid was empty so we figured we would give it a try.

Anytime I brew or bottle, its always nice to have a drink of the last batch. This is a hard cider that we made and bottled in beer bottles. It turned out really good and very strong.

Here's 54 cleaned/sanitized bottles ready to be filled. You can buy bottles from a homebrew store but what fun is that? I opted for buying a couple cases of beer with popoff caps, (the twist off ones you can't reuse) and drinking those until I had a nice collection of bottles.

After mixing up the priming sugar, to give the beer carbonation. Its time to siphon the beer into the bottling bucket.

Now to fill the bottles.

Now onto the capping, this is my favorite part.

All capped, in 2-3 weeks it will be carbonated and ready to enjoy. I can't wait until the 3 week carbonation period is up so I can taste the finished beer. The sample I had today is promising to be a good brew.

My next batch (cherry stout) is ready and going into a cornelius keg so the carbonation period will only be 2-3 days. Hopefully this will be a project for this week. Also going to brew a batch of honey lager this week.