Bottling day

Transferring beer to priming tank

Bottling day arrived at last.  Fermentation visibly stopped on Wednesday so I targeted Saturday to bottle.  You want to wait at least 2 days after bubbles stop to bottle to ensure fermentation is complete.  The arduous task of cleaning and sanitizing 50+ bottles as well as the fermenting equipment took up quite a bit of time.  I need to switch over to kegging, bottling is a huge pain in the rear.   Once everything is clean and sanitized, I moved the fermenter back into the kitchen and began moving the beer into the priming tank.  You officially have beer now, if kegging you could move it directly into your keg and force carbonate.  The more traditional route is to add some sugar to the priming tank and then bottle it up.  The sugar provides some additional fuel for the yeast.  This produces more fermentation and waste CO2 which carbonates the beer in the bottle.  The downside here is that you will end up with some sediment in your beer.  Filtering and kegging would give you a "clean" bottle but also can take away from some of the aging flavors you can realize especially on higher alcohol content brews.  Prior to starting the bottling, I took a final gravity measurement.  Using a simple math equation, you can determine the alcohol content of your beer (SG - FG x 131.25). For this beer, I look to have an alcohol content of 5.25%.  A good session beer, but lower alcohol content than expected by the recipe.  My starting gravity was lower than expected, which I suspect was due to an in efficient grain conversion.  Not surprising as this is the first time I have integrated a significant amount of grain with my extract.  If any of you have advice on how I can increase my efficiency, please post a comment.  I am pretty sure my sparging process kind of sucked.

taking my finishing gravity reading