It was another exciting weekday as I primed and bottled the Hefeweizen from the fermenter. I noticed no fermentation whatsoever and no bubbles in the fermenter and decided to prime and bottle.
Priming is where the brewer adds that wee bit of fermentable sugar to the beer at bottling to carbonate the beer. The two important questions a lot of first time brewers ask is what kind of sugar and how much sugar?
What kind of sugar to use is a difficult question to answer. There’s table sugar, corn sugar, honey, jiggery and so on. Some even make a solution with the dry malt extract and use that to prime. What you want to use is your call. I went with table sugar, which is pretty much regular sugar that I add to tea or coffee.
How much sugar is an even more difficult question to answer. From the research I did on the internet, I decided to go with somewhere between 6 to 7 grams of sugar per litre. Which means that for 4 litres of beer, I should use between 24 to 28 grams of sugar. I went with 24 grams.
Now that those two questions are answered, I can prime and bottle. To bottle, I used the half litre PET bottles from soft drinks and sodas.
I brought a full cup of water to a rolling boil and kept it there for 5 minutes during which I added the sugar. After 5 minutes, I switched off the flame, and cooled the sugar solution. The sugar was then added to the bottles in equal amounts. I have to admit that this is a cumbersome process and I will have to find a better way to prime.
I slowly opened the water dispenser tap and allowed the beer to flow into the bottles slowly without disturbing the yeast cake at the bottom of the dispenser. Once I got almost all of the beer out, I capped them and left them in a dark cabinet.
How long do I keep the beer bottled before opening? Many brewers suggest between 2 to 4 weeks. Here’s how I plan to do it: I will open a bottle at 2 weeks and check and that should tell me if the rest of them are ready too.
Note: Although I initially stated 4 litres of beer, I lost some to the trub at the bottom of the fermenter. This was something I had not accounted for and I now have about 3.6 litres of the Hefeweizen.
Priming is where the brewer adds that wee bit of fermentable sugar to the beer at bottling to carbonate the beer. The two important questions a lot of first time brewers ask is what kind of sugar and how much sugar?
What kind of sugar to use is a difficult question to answer. There’s table sugar, corn sugar, honey, jiggery and so on. Some even make a solution with the dry malt extract and use that to prime. What you want to use is your call. I went with table sugar, which is pretty much regular sugar that I add to tea or coffee.
How much sugar is an even more difficult question to answer. From the research I did on the internet, I decided to go with somewhere between 6 to 7 grams of sugar per litre. Which means that for 4 litres of beer, I should use between 24 to 28 grams of sugar. I went with 24 grams.
Now that those two questions are answered, I can prime and bottle. To bottle, I used the half litre PET bottles from soft drinks and sodas.
I brought a full cup of water to a rolling boil and kept it there for 5 minutes during which I added the sugar. After 5 minutes, I switched off the flame, and cooled the sugar solution. The sugar was then added to the bottles in equal amounts. I have to admit that this is a cumbersome process and I will have to find a better way to prime.
I slowly opened the water dispenser tap and allowed the beer to flow into the bottles slowly without disturbing the yeast cake at the bottom of the dispenser. Once I got almost all of the beer out, I capped them and left them in a dark cabinet.
How long do I keep the beer bottled before opening? Many brewers suggest between 2 to 4 weeks. Here’s how I plan to do it: I will open a bottle at 2 weeks and check and that should tell me if the rest of them are ready too.
Note: Although I initially stated 4 litres of beer, I lost some to the trub at the bottom of the fermenter. This was something I had not accounted for and I now have about 3.6 litres of the Hefeweizen.
No comments:
Post a Comment