So how can my beer go from barely no carbonation from 3 days ago to practically shooting out of the bottle after cracking one open?
DoctorDuvel said:hey - you guys ever experience this?: tried a beer less than a week in the bottle (in this case, a fairly typical hoppy pale ale), tastes delicious and damn near ready...but a week later, it's not nearly as good, definitely has a lot of "offness" and bite that needs to be cleaned up
...is there some sort of curve of progression in the bottle conditioning process?
Don't you use a bottling wand to fill your beer? It's made to set the proper amount of head space in bottles, no matter what sized bottles. You fill the bottle til it starts to over flow and pull the wand out, the displacement from the wand sets the headspace. Which is around 1.25 inches iirc.
Hey Revvy,
Not to add to your workload around here, but would you mind adding this to the OP? This is something I didn't know, and my first bottling is right around the corner. I would have been stopping the flow an inch below the neck every time if not for you!
Back to my main point: Not everyone will read 46 pages in to find that gem, and I feel like it would be an excellent addition to your (otherwise) Complete Bottling Guide.
I find the bottling wand takes all the fun out of filling the bottles. That is why I let my kids bottle the beer. (and make wallets)
Great thread. Thanks Revvy & Co for all the great advice.
Have returned to HB after a 5 year break during which I was a client of a local UBrew4U microbrewery which has now closed down due to being unprofitable in a regional location.
A couple of questions:
1. I have been bottling directly from my primary fermenter. Is this Kosher? Have only racked from primary once and experienced an infected brew.
2. This approaching Aussie winter I plan to use lager yeasts. Will I still need to carb at 70degF for 3 weeks, or can I successfully carb by storing my bottles at the lower fermentation temperature range that lagers utilise?
Cheers
PC
Yes, I made a dip tube for my bottling bucket out of a 3/4" PVC 90deg elbow. I think it cost $0.39 at Lowe's and threads right onto the tail piece of the bottling spigot. It couldn't be simpler. Check out my gallery for a poorly done schematic and/or PM me and I'll verify the part number. Or do what I did and bring the spigot with you to Lowe's and see what threads onto it. When I fill bottles with this I am usually left with about 2 or 3 oz. of beer in the bucket.
This is exactly what I did... Was left with a pretty dry bucket!
For some reason my bottling wand doesn't fit directly on to my bottling bucket's spigot like i see it does for most of you guys. Would it be ok to cut a 6" or so section of vinyl tubing off of my siphon hose and use that to connect the wand to the spigot, or would that create oxidation when filling my bottles?
I don't think it fits on anybody's...If you read my instructions, that's exactly what I and most everyone else does.
Cool. I thought i read through all your post, but i missed that part. I'm assuming that's what you're using the little plastic clamps for? Do you use two total? One on the spigot and one on the wand side?
progmac said:Thanks to whomever made this suggestion. I picked up the 3/4" PVC elbow at Lowe's for peanuts. Like less than a dollar. It works great. It's amazing how it is exactly the right size. Just apply and tighten the spigot like normal and put this on the end.
A note for those looking at Lowe's. I didn't think they had a threaded one at first, I could only find a non-threaded 3/4" elbow. The threaded 3/4" is in a totally separate section from the non-threaded; in my store it was in a different aisle, so be sure to look around.
Great thread. Thanks Revvy & Co for all the great advice.
A couple of questions:
1. I have been bottling directly from my primary fermenter. Is this Kosher? Have only racked from primary once and experienced an infected brew.
2. This approaching Aussie winter I plan to use lager yeasts. Will I still need to carb at 70degF for 3 weeks, or can I successfully carb by storing my bottles at the lower fermentation temperature range that lagers utilise?
I'm a newbie to brewing but just looking at how my mates do theirs and the equipment and kits you see at LHBS around here, I get the impression that we aren't as adverse to a bit of sediment in our brew here in Australia. We even have quite popular commercial beers (ie. Coopers) that embrace it to a degree.
Looking at the website for the store I go to, I don't even see available any of these bottling buckets or glass carboys that I keep spotting in lots of pics on here. There's all sorts of shapes and sizes of plastic fermenters though with taps right at the bottom to bottle from directly. And bottling wands that fit straight onto the taps seem to be the norm.
As for your lager, I just put one on myself (only my 3rd batch ever, still waiting for my 1st batch of pilsner to condition while I get the pipeline cranking) and I sure as hell don't plan on wasting any time before bottling it once it stops bubbling and has hit it's final gravity. I'll want to use the fermenter to start another batch asap, and I don't like the sound of having to get 3 or 4 fermenters just to have them all going at once yet. But perhaps I'm just not that picky or patient yet?
The sticky bit, which I haven't figured out yet, is how to prime the beer without using a bottling bucket. I could keg and force carbonate, of course, but I have no intention of going down that road.
My beginners kit came with a bunch of little candy looking droplets of some type of sugar/starch, already the right size to drop one in small or two in large bottles prior to capping them. For my current batch I'm going to try just scooping the correctly measured/weighed amount of normal sugar in myself. I figure if I line all the bottles up prior to filling them and measure the sugar into all of them one after the other it shouldn't take too much longer than it would to drop the carbonation drops in.
But if it ends up interrupting the process too much I might just buy more pre-made drops, since they work out to just under 6 cents per small bottle.
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