The little brass Jet Bottle Washer screws right on to the sink spout and squirts a strong stream of water up inside the bottle when the bottle is pressed down on the switch. That rinses away any delabeling chemicals or dust.
The iodine sanitizer is considered "no rinse" as long as it is left to dry on its own, so I line the bottles up in rows, upside down on clean paper towels to dry. There exists a nifty gadget called a "bottle tree" that will hold all the bottles for drying, but I do not yet have one.
The 5 gallon carboy that I used as a secondary fermenter is tilted because I put a rolled up towel under one side. This lets the siphon tube go straight down to the corner and get the maximum amount of beer without sucking up much of the yeasty sediment on the bottom.
The small blue bowl has 50 bottlecaps getting a quick dip in the same iodine solution.
The racking equipment has to be sanitized, and sanitizing long skinny stuff like this can be a problem because it is all longer than my buckets are tall. One solution is to use a wallpaper tray, as shown here on the left.
Once the equipment is sanitized and the sugar-water is in the bucket, I can gently siphon the beer from the carboy to the botting bucket, being careful not to splash. Splashing at this point oxidizes the beer and makes it smell like the floor of a tavern on Sunday morning before it has been swamped out from Saturday night.
The bucket gets lifted up to the counter and a tube attached to its spigot. At the
other end of the tube is a "bottling wand," a long straight tube with a spring-loaded
valve at the end. The tube goes down to the bottom of each bottle, where I press to
make the beer flow gently (no foaming!). Then a cap gets set on loosely to keep dust
out and maybe let newly generated carbon dioxide push out some of the air.
I stage a dozen or so bottles on the blue towel, bring them one at a time to the metal drip pan to fill, then move back to the towel. Once they are all filled, I crimp on the caps with my antique bench capper (built like an old fashioned automobile bumper jack) and set them aside for storage.
The -18- is the batch number, Sept 22, 02 is the bottling date, 53 is the original gravity (1.053), 11 is the final gravity (1.011) and 5.5% is the alcohol content by volume.
Easy Blonde is the name of the batch. This recipe was called Simple Beer and looked sort of blonde to me, so I tried Simple Blonde. That made the name line break into two lines, so I needed a shorter name. My 10 year old daughter was looking over my shoulder and innocently said "well, Easy is a synonym for Simple; how about that?" I chuckled and agreed and thus cristened the batch.
I make sure to do one clear bottle per batch so I can keep an eye on how well it is clearing and see the color. This picture came out a little dark; perhaps I'll try again with more light."
Last updated May 10, 2005