The Chin Brewery: Work day two

On Friday we finished up the beer making process.  There wasn't that much to it, but it seemed to take a really long time because my dad was trying to get himself ready for a snow camping trip that he was leading with the scouts this past weekend.  It really only took us about three hours from start to finish and most of that was just cleaning the bottles.

Boiling bottles

Around 2pm I brought my computer for work downstairs and started cleaning the bottles that my parents had purchased in the morning.  Because they were new, I washed them all by hand first just to make sure all the particulate matter from the warehouse was off of them.  My dad and I debated a little while about how to fully sanitize the bottles.  The instructions that we read said to leave the bottles in a bleach-water mixture for half an hour, but we were planning on boiling them like how you would baby bottles.  We hemmed and hawed about it for a while because we wanted to do what the directions said, but didn't really want to have to deal with a bleach-water mixture.  We decided to go with our first plan and boil the bottles.  I did them in three batches.

Sanitized bottles

We are siphoning the first step of fermented beer into a clean jug with a diluted simple syrup mixture to prime the beer.  Priming is what makes the beer carbonated.  The sugar is basically food for the yeast to create carbonation. 

After reading and reading about sanitation and not wanting to get any bacteria growth in our beer, we were finally ready.  Our tube, funnel, and jug were ready for priming and then my dad went to siphon.  I hope that his siphoning didn't ruin the whole sanitation process.  I'm not really sure what other way to siphon though.

We tried using a coffee filter to catch all the sediment at the bottom of the carboy, but the filter didn't drain fast enough and was clogging our funnel so that the beer threatened to spill over the top of the funnel. 

We loaded our bottles into a pot so that we didn't make a mess when filling them up.

Team work!

Filling the bottles

Capping 

Why is it that Christopher always seems to do stuff with his hood on?  He looks like  a hoodlum! 

Using the capper for the bottle caps

Completed bottle

Chin Brew!

This was left in the carboy.  We tasted it and it was okay.  It still needs to ferment in order for it to taste good.  At this point it kind of tasted like watered down beer.  We left it out for a while just so that all the stuff could settle because we didn't want to drink the sediment.

Now all we have to do is wait for the second round of fermentation.  The directions that we were following says 7-10 days to have this completed, but the books and magazines that my dad has been reading say to leave it alone for a month and that the longer it ferments the better.  We will see how long we can wait.  My plan is to forget about it for a while until I can't stand it anymore.