Bottling the Wassailweizen

Today Jono and I bottled the much anticipated Wassailweizen! Here are some of the photos from our adventure along with some educational commentary on a process about which you may know nothing.

To the left Jono is enjoying a taster of the pre-conditioned (non-carbonated) beer. It's always fun to try the beer at the early stages. It has alcohol and great flavor, but no carbonation. Although the beer always tastes premature at this stage, you get an idea of its potential. Jono compares it to seeing a child and imagining what they'll look like at 35.

This beer is super sweet and leaves you feeling as if you've just sipped cider. Cloves, cinnamon, apple, and orange flavors are all clearly present.

The first step to bottling your beer is getting the bottles clean. Because I recycle many of my beer bottles, we need to scrub the labels off, clean, rinse, and sanitize 50 bottles.

We add about 2/3 cup sugar to the beer, giving the yeast something to consume in the bottles. Their metabolic conversion produces ethanol and CO2 (alcohol and carbonation).

Following tradition, we had to take a break to enjoy our most recent brew, Jim Whitaker's Bitaker ESB. Delicious!

We fill each bottle carefully via that handy-dandy spigot. You want to leave about an inch of air space to allow for pressure change.

Sealing a cap on each bottle ensures sanitation and locks in the CO2 so that each beer is carbonated.

I hope you enjoyed learning about bottling! Hopefully I'll get to share one of these with you!