Episode: 142
Title: HPR0142: Home Brew Part 2 - Bottling and Fermentation Fun
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0142/hpr0142.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:21:40

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Man, yeah.
That's it.
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Hello and welcome to the episode two of the home brewing episode.
This is again the Yelke Mantis, your favorite, I don't know if I'm your favorite, I'm just
making a assumption that home brewing companion, by now you should have some nice, almost
ready to be bottled beer, had you know gone out and purchased your home brew kit
and gotten everything around when episode one of the Hacker Public Radio home brewing series
was really.
A couple of notes about episode two, episode two is going to start off with bottling and
then go on to fermentation fun and this episode of Hacker Public Radio is coming to you
from my car, Dave H has that great car cast where he says coming at you from 70 miles
an hour or 65 or something like that, I'm averaging about 40 driving the back roads
of Pennsylvania between clients, anyway on to happy topics such as home brew, now the
equipment that you're going to need from your equipment list of the first episode is
going to be your siphoning tube, your bottles, any brushes or knives that you might want
to keep handy, a bottling vessel, your priming sugar, you do not necessarily need a spoon
to be sterilized, however if you want to get a spoon sterilized that is completely acceptable.
Let's see, and you might need if your priming sugar is not pre-measured, you might want
to get a scale because scales are more accurate than measuring cups because scales take
into account the volume of air in a powdered substance, whereas a cup size measuring tool
does not.
Anyway oniva, so what you do, first things first is you sterilize, you sterilize everything,
you sterilize everything well, when we made the wart, you remember that I talked very
heavily about sterilization, tried to stress the importance of sterilization, it's even
more important with the bottling phase of brewing.
If you don't sterilize your tube efficiently or not efficiently but sufficiently enough,
all your beer is going to go bad, all of it, every last drop of beer is going to be bad
because it's going to have contaminants in the tube, novel we want, so sterilize, sterilize,
everything has to be completely stale and clean for this step.
You're working with a whole mess of equipment, whereas before you had your pot and a few
other things, now you've got 50 to 60 bottles that you're dealing with and your tube and
your bottling vessel and so on and so forth, it all has to be clean and sterile, I cannot
stress this enough obviously.
So once everything is clean and sterilized, a note on the bottles I usually put some sterilizing
solution, the seabright in my dishwasher with the dishwasher turned on high heat with
heat dry, now I know that some people recommend against this, but I've had pretty good results
with it, last batch I think I had one or two bad bottles out of the whole kit and caboodle,
so it's a pretty easy way of getting pretty good results as far as I'm concerned in sterilization.
Now you want to dissolve your priming sugar and sterilize the water at the same time, so
you're going to take a cup or two of water depending on what your recipe calls for and
you're going to boil it, and then you're going to dump in your priming sugar, usually
between two and four ounces depending on what kind of beer you're making, put the low
gravity high gravity, whatever your recipe calls for, do that.
The last recipe I had was just two ounces of priming sugar, which is not very much
all.
So you take your priming sugar, you dump it in, you dissolve it and let that boil off
for a couple of seconds, turn off the stove, and swirl your cup or two of water around,
then dump it into your bottling vessel.
Now your bottling vessel can be a five gallon bucket, it can be a, what I used is a five
gallon igloo cooler, I have one of those ones with the spout on the bottom for you know sporting
events or whatever, use it when I go camping to spill it with water, but I sterilize that
up and use it as my bottling vessel.
Dump the hot water into there with the sugar, and then I siphoned my beer into that vessel.
I didn't worry about stirring because the agitation of the beer going into the mixture is
going to very easily stir the sugars into the whole thing, it s going to be thoroughly
distributed.
So that s not a big deal worrying about that.
What you do have to worry about is agitation, granted the chemists among you are going
to say well you want a little bit of oxygen so the fermentation can take place once you
put it in the bottle, you are absolutely right.
The amount of oxygen that you want however is very, very, very, very small.
You don't want a lot of oxygen because it can impart weird flavors into your beer, it
can actually cause other reactions to occur in your beer.
So when you siphoned it off with the end of your siphon in the bottom of the bucket,
so that after the first couple of seconds it s completely underwater that will be more
than enough oxygen dispersed into your beer.
Plus you re moving it all, that beer s going to be moving, it s going to get plenty of
oxygen.
You should worry more about getting too much than too little.
Worried about siphoning, if you re using the glass carboy method like I do, get a racking
cane I guess is called.
And on the other end you re going to have the tube with a bend in it and a little cap
on it.
My cap s black, I ve seen white, I ve seen red.
And what this cap does is it prevents the yeast from being sucked up the siphon hose.
It s pretty neat.
If you re using one of these caps you can typically just throw in your hardened plastic tube, start
with the siphon, which you want to do with water, you don t want to put your mouth on
the siphoning hose, because then again you re going to be contaminating.
So you start your siphon, you get that down in there and pretty much just make sure
the siphoning hose doesn t come out of the bottling bucket and you don t have to worry about
it again.
I ve had really really good luck with those little caps designed for that purpose.
So there we are, everything has gone from your primary fermentation vessel into your
bottling bucket.
Your bottling bucket is important so that you get an even distribution of sugar and an
easy place where you don t have to worry about agitating the yeast off the bottom.
Don t worry about yeast getting into your bottle to create those nice busy bubbles that
we re looking for.
There s plenty of yeast still suspended in your liquid as you will see in about three
weeks.
Now, a note on priming sugar, I probably wish it had said this back when we were talking
about priming sugar, but I didn t, so use the exact amount of priming sugar recommended
by your recipe.
This cannot be stressed enough, especially if you have pets and small children.
If you put in too much priming sugar, your vessels will explode.
I don t know necessarily about the PET plastic bottles, but I do know that glass bottles
can t explode, they usually explode around the neck, throwing jars of glass.
I ve had this happen because I put in too much sugar one time.
Now, you don t want to put in too little sugar because then you all have that nice
bit, but you just follow the recipe and everything will be good.
As you take readings on your specific gravity, now would be a nice time to take a little
bit out and do a specific gravity reading, see where your specific gravity saddled out.
You can take the stuff that you use to test your specific gravity and drink it.
See what it tastes like, remember the whole point of home brewing is not only to save
a little bit of money making really high quality beer, but to be able to control each step
of it and see what each step is like, see what it tastes like, see what happens if you
do this, what happens if you experiment.
Take your specific gravity reading and record it, record how much sugar you add, record
the specific gravity after you add that sugar, so on and so forth.
You can do a whole bunch of fun stuff recording just extremely minute details and then changing
some of those minute details and see what happens.
Anyway, on to the rest of the bottling process.
This process works best if you have two people.
One person filling the bottles, the other person moving the bottles and capping them.
It's just the absolute easiest way.
A couple of times I've made beer, my life has been able to help me and it goes so much
fast to that way.
Shape those and I move the bottles and capping because the capping is a little bit more physically
content.
You have to push down on the bottles pretty hard.
Now, if you don't have two people, here's what you do.
You line up every last one of your bottles within reach of your bottling tool so that you
can put your bottling tool down into the bottom of the bottle, fill up your bottle, pull it
out and you want about an inch at the top of your bottle.
So, up all of your bottles, then after you're done filling up all of your bottles, clean
up your siphon, put your bottling bucket aside and then cap each of your bottles, then
wipe off each of your bottles and put them in a storage location.
By doing one thing at a time, you're decreasing the risk of cross contamination of, you know,
if you're wiping off bottles, maybe there's bacteria on the bottle, you might get bacteria
on the lip of your bottle as you're capping it in any number of different ways.
So if you're just capping, you keep capping if you're filling, keep filling, if you're,
you know, cleaning and storing to do that, never mix your steps.
If you absolutely have to pause what you're doing in the middle of a step, go ahead and
do that.
Pause what you're doing, but before you come back, make sure you sterilize your hands,
make sure you sterilize the equipment that you're using.
Be very, very careful.
Now everything's in bottles, put those bottles aside, wait three weeks, toss them in the fridge,
let them sit for 24 hours.
This is very important.
After they sat for 24 hours in your refrigerator, pop the top and pour a glass.
When you pour a glass, leave the bottom quarter to a half an inch in the bottle.
You will see after you've done that, you can shake that up and pour it out into a second glass,
it will be a creamy white color.
That's all that yeast that was created after you put it in the bottle while maybe not entirely,
but you know, they were born from the yeast that was already in the solution.
When you put it in the refrigerator, it dropped out, so it clarified the yeast a little bit,
and there's much less yeast in the bottle, the beer that you poured into the glass.
You never want to drink homemade beer out of the bottle.
And the reason for this is simple, yeast.
It tastes like yeast, it doesn't taste like beer.
If you drink it out of the bottle, you're going to be tipping the bottle and shaking the bottle
and moving the bottle around as you, you know, get mad at your friends while playing poker
or whatever it is you do when you drink beer.
So, you don't want to be drinking directly out of the bottle.
You want to drink out of the glass.
Now, some people may think that that's being a sissy,
you can just laugh at them as they drink their Budweiser.
And know that your beer is far superior to theirs.
And so on and so forth.
Now, note on bottling versus caking.
I'm sure a lot of you have listened so far and said, yes, but I don't like bottles.
I want to make a cake. Have at it.
I've never done it simply because it's far too expensive.
And I don't really have a need to because I usually end up sharing my beer with neighbors and so on and so forth.
Caking requires a lot of extra equipment.
It's the other end of the spectrum.
You need your cake washer, you need your CO2 tanks, your regulators, your taps,
your refrigerators and so on and so forth.
It is an entirely intensive purpose.
It's very, very expensive to get started.
It will probably triple a quadruple of your costs of making beer initially.
The upside of cakes is, hey, they're reusable for all get out.
You never have a flat beer because you're adding in carbon dioxide to push the beer out.
It's pretty cool to have your own bar in your house and be like,
hey man, check it out. I made this one last Thursday and so on and so forth.
So that's pretty cool. There is also an intermediary step sort of.
This is called the PartyPake.
The PartyPake comes in approximately two and a half gallon sizes.
It is a PET bottle, which is a plastic bottle.
And it's got little satchels that you put in that really specific amounts of carbon dioxide
in order to maintain a specific pressure inside the bottle at any given time.
So you always have fizzy beer.
It is a little bit more expensive than individual bottles.
You're, again, adding carbon dioxide, which you're adding carbon dioxide
through the fermentation process so that's no real difference.
You're just doing this one in a chemical process, opposed to like the natural yeast process.
The PartyPake seems to be pretty cool.
It's got a little neoprene sheath that you can buy for it and it's supposed to keep it cool longer.
It looks like it should fit in your fridge and you can buy one of those.
I saw them online for $39, but be cautious when you buy it because the startup kit that I saw
did not have the CO2 activation pump that is required by the PartyPake to work.
That was an extra $9, but you only need one of those for all of your little PartyPake cakes.
So if you have one pressurizing nozzle, you can do as many cakes as you want.
The price difference is about $5 or $6 per batch.
So that's entirely up to you because you need a CO2 pouch for each new batch and that's kind of your replacement object.
Instead of buying caps, you're buying a CO2.
I think sooner or later I might try the PartyPakes.
Right now I'm just really happy with the bottles because I can share them with my friends
and not have to worry about getting them back or being damaged or anything like that.
So I'm pretty happy with the bottles.
If you're lazy and don't want to do that and you're just going to drink two and a half gallons of beer in the sitting, go to PartyPake.
Now on to fermentation fun.
Now as many of you may or may not know, I have a sun.
And my sun is currently 10 months old, but sooner or later he's going to become more than 10 months old, like we've turned 11 months old.
And sooner or later he's going to say, Daddy, what are you doing?
And I'm going to say, well, fun. I am making a tasty multiple beverage for myself.
And being a good dad, I hope I am.
He's probably going to say, well, hey, Dad, can I do that too?
And I'll say, how about this? How about we make a tasty multiple beverage for you?
Now some of you out there may be saying, you're going to give your kid beer?
No, I'm going to make soda pop.
Now the process for making soda pop is similar to the process of making beer with a couple exceptions.
One, we don't have as much fermentable sugar.
Two, we don't encourage as much fermentation.
When you're done making beer, you're going to have about the same amount of alcohol in your liquid as you would in a bottle of Florida orange juice.
Because yes, it is. You know, a fruit based thing and yes, it will ferment. It's orange juice.
So here's what you need. You need a bucket.
Depending on how much root beer or cola you're going to make, you need a big or a small bucket.
Second thing you need. A long handled spoon.
They made fun of me for calling this a food grade spoon because of course it's a spoon. It's going to be food grade.
But what you want is a non-porous high quality spoon, one that's not going to be harboring any bacteria.
Long handled so that you can not touch your liquid.
And you're going to need your siphoning tube and the plastic bottles.
The plastic bottles are PET bottles. And this is a special kind of plastic. It's not like a coke bottle.
It's a little bit more durable style of plastic. It's designed to be reused where the coke bottle is designed to go in a landfill.
And they theoretically are designing those to biodegrade more quickly.
And I guess once you reuse the coke bottle, nasty chemicals are imparted into your liquid.
So don't reuse bottles that you buy in the store. Make sure you have plastic bottles specifically for this purpose.
Now, what you're going to do is you're going to find a recipe.
Your local brew shop probably has a whole bunch of soda flavors. And some recipes.
There are some really, really great recipes online that use three different kinds of sugar.
This much fermentable sugar, this much non-fermentable sugar, this much sugar that will encourage busyness.
That's pretty cool.
There's also typically you want to use champagne yeast.
My understanding of it is, and it's always worked for me, that you don't want to use any more than a quarter of a teaspoon of yeast per batch of soda pop.
And the reason is, you don't want to encourage too much fermentation.
But what you're going to do is this. You're going to mix it into your, essentially, soda pop work.
And you're going to take your sugar and your flavorings, and you're going to mix all that in according to the instructions that you found for your recipe.
And we'll get to some instructions in just a second.
Then you're going to bottle it into your PET plastic bottles.
And I recommend a little bit larger than 12 ounce plastic bottles. I would recommend, you know, a liter or two liter plastic bottles for this purpose.
And then you're going to set it in a cool, dark place for a minimum of three weeks.
Now with your beer, when you're doing this process with your beer, you're not all that concerned, necessarily, with letting it sit three weeks.
I always open a bottle a week minimum, just to see how it's progressing, to see what it's tasting like, to see how the fizz is going, to see whether I've stuck fermentation in any bottles or anything like that.
I like tasting it as it's aging.
With soda pop, do not do this.
It will not be fizzy enough before the pre-arranged date.
How you can tell that it's fizzy enough is when it is rock hard, the bottle will just be very, very hard.
You'll think that you'd filled it with lead, you won't be able to put any dent in it with your thumb.
At this point in time, you put it into the refrigerator for 24 hours.
Again, what you're trying to do is you're trying to clarify your soda pop, and get any yeast to settle out of it.
So you put it in there for 24 hours, pop the top, and enjoy.
You'll have yourself a nice fizzy tasty beverage.
Now the coolness about soda pop is not only as simple enough that your kids can participate in it, but...
You don't have to follow recipes closely.
You can experiment a little bit.
For example, root beer.
One of the primary flavoring ingredients in root beer is winter green.
Now not all flavors of root beer have winter green as their primary flavor, but a lot of them do have that strong winter green flavor.
Another big ingredient in root beer is anus, believe it or not, and sasperilla root.
So there's all of these different flavors in root beer that you can kind of mix in, and maybe come up with your own root beer recipe and share it online.
Speaking of sharing soda pop recipes online, there is actually a project released under the GPL, which you and I know we all love.
That is designed to be comparable to commercially available sodas such as coke or patty.
Now that's pretty cool, I think, and the recipe online is designed to get you a flavor of a coke that tastes like something you would buy in a store and you can make it at home.
This is called the Open Cola Project, and if you check out the show notes, there will be a link to the Open Cola Project as well as to a couple other places where you can download recipes for different styles of soda pop.
But that is pretty cool because not only can you be participating in an open source project, but you can be making soda pop with your kids or if you like soda pop, you can make your own soda pop by liquid caffeine.
You can add as much caffeine as you want, you could make an energy drink. I'm sure that's what the guys who made the balls soft drink did and they got together and started experimenting and said, hey, this tastes pretty good.
At any rate, soda pop is a key to experimentation. Something interesting that I was thinking about root beer, I should have mentioned while I was talking about root beer, but something interesting that you could try is adding some melted barley to your root beer recipe to see how that would taste.
I think that would be quite interesting because then your root beer would have some beer-ish origins and you would add that malt just like you would in a regular beer.
I haven't tried that, but I think next time I make root beer, I'm not going to get maybe half a pound or a pound of medium roasted malt and put that in there.
Anyway, this has been Hacker Public Radio, home brew episode number two. This is the Yelpie Mat that's saying, have a good day and drive safe.
This has been Hacker Public Radio, home brew episode number two.
Thank you very much.
