Bottling Time!

Josh and I bottled our first batch of beer yesterday! For our first batch, we chose a weizenbier, which is a German wheat beer. We used a kit for this batch, but we'll be using a recipe for the next. Josh decided he wanted to name it "Naive" since that's what we were when we started out. Haha. We messed up a few things, but I think it's still going to turn out pretty good! I didn't think to look at our start time, but I think it probably took about 2 hours including sanitizing everything. We had some issues siphoning the beer from the fermenter to the bucket we bottled from, but we figured it out eventually. I think we ended up with about 44 bottles and a mason jar. The mason jar is completely experimental and we don't expect it to work out very well...but at least it looks nice! This is a little less than we expected to yield, but we accidentally drained a few pints out early in the fermentation process. I also spilled a little while I was filling. 

 The beer in the carboy before we siphoned it out. Notice all the gunk at the top? That's from the hops we forgot to filter out.

 Siphoning into the bucket. We finally filtered here.

 Josh bottling our first beer!

 The capper.

Beer #1!

Josh did most of the filling and I did most of the capping, but we both tried each. He decided he likes filling the bottles better. I thought I would too, but luckily I like capping better! I wasn't very good at filling and I tend to not enjoy things I suck at. Now the beer has to age in the bottles for a little bit to carbonate. We should be able to try our finished product in a little over a week!

We have a long way to go, but we learned so much from this first batch. We're hoping to brew our second batch this Friday. I'm excited to do something festive! We're doing a Pumpkin Ale. I'm not crazy about Pumpkin Ales, so I have no idea why I'm so excited about it, but I am!