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Key to Successful Brewing: Keep it Clean! (Part 2) |
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By Frosty
When it comes to setting up to bottle your home brewed beer you simply cannot be too careful in terms of cleanliness. The sanitation process is nearly the same as that described in my earlier article “Keep It Clean (Part I)”. Your guiding principle should is still to throughly clean anything that will come in contact with your (now fermented) beer. The most likely suspects in this endeavour will be your racking/bottling vessel, your plastic siphon tubing, you, your siphon wand, your priming sugar, your bottling valve, your bottles, and your bottle caps.
  
As I recommend in the prior
article, start by completely cleaning your work area. Make sure you
have clean towels to lay out on your clean counters so you will have a
good place to set things once you have sanitized them. your most
important target should be your sink. Scrub it down with a good
cleanser, rinse it completely, then fill it with two gallons of warm
water and dissolve the proper amount of Type A no-rinse cleanser. Be
sure to rinse the entire sink with the cleanser mixture (you know, the
part above the water line) by splashing a bit all around. Do not drain
the cleanser from the sink – you will use it to rinse all of your
bottling tools.
Submerse all of your tubing, your siphon wand
and the bottling valve in the sink. Make sure the cleanser flushes
completely through the tubing. Fill the bottling valve to the top then
hold it over the sink (valve down) and press in the valve so that the
contents of the plastic wand drain out through the valve. Do this
several times. As each item is removed from the sink set it out on the
clean towels to dry. If your bottling vessel has a valve built into the
bottom of the side of the bucket be sure to dismantle that unit and
rinse the parts in the sink full of cleanser. Also be sure to rinse out
the racking/bottling vessel with the cleanser. This can be tricky,
especially if you have removed the valve from the bottom leaving an
inconvenient hole. Do your best to get every inch of the inside of that
vessel in contact with the no-rinse cleanser.
Now is the time to
address the bottles. If you have a dishwasher with a heated dry cycle
you can probably just run them once through the wash cycle and let the
heating element dry and sanitize them. If you don't have a dishwasher
you are stuck rinsing all of your beer bottles in the cleanser filled
sink. This not the most pleasant of jobs but it is a necessity. Make
sure each bottle is filled completely with cleanser before you drain it
back into the sink. In order to dry out the bottles you have to stand
them up upside-down so the liquid inside can drain. I used to use waxed
paper to set them on and it is a real art to get them to stand up. I
used to do it this way (before I discovered the dishwasher) so I know
it works.
As your bottles dry you can turn your attention to the
priming sugar and your bottle caps. I dissolve the priming sugar in a
pint (16 oz.) of clean water. I usually use a small sauce pan (also
dipped in the cleanser in the sink) for this operation. Once the sugar
is in solution go ahead an boil the mixture for 5 minutes on the stove.
At the same time you can boil all of your bottle caps in clean water in
another sauce pan (you guessed it, previously dipped in the sink) for 5
minutes.
OK – you are ready to start bottling your beer. Just
pour the boiled sugar into the racking vessel and start siphoning your
beer from the fermenter into the vessel.
Once you have
completed your bottling session make sure you take the time to
thoroughly wash all of your equipment. This means you must rewash all
of the stuff you sanitized earlier and your fermenter. It is critical
(to your next batch of home brew) that everything be as clean as it can
be when you are done.
Good Luck!!!
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