Despite my efforts last week to restart the fermentation of my homebrew, I opened the bucket last night to find it still stuck at 1.020. I decided to give up on any additional fermentation and decided to bottle the beer last night. To do this I used a racking tube and hose to siphon the beer from the fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket. Before starting the flow, I added a dissolved corn sugar mixture to the bottling bucket. I accidentally stopped the siphoning a little early, and only ended up with 4 gallons of beer in the bottling bucket. I tried restarting the siphon, but just ended up stirring up the sediment and decided to discard the remaining gallon.

With the beer transferred over to the bottling bucket, I reattached the hose to the spout on the bucket and attached the bottle filling wand to the other end. Filling the bottles was pretty simple, but a little messy if I accidentally overfilled them. Instead of using the sanitizing mixture provided with my kit, I sanitized the bottles using the dish washer. I didn’t add any detergent or sanitizer to it, just let it run with water and the sanitizing is actually done via the heat of the dry cycle.

When all of the bottles were filled and capped, I put them back into the boxes they arrived in, which should provide enough darkness for the carbonation stage that should last the next few weeks. I’m not putting them back into the same closet I used for fermentation and instead trying out a warmer corner of the house. Since I didn’t have the full 5 gallons transferred, I ended up with just over one and a half cases of beer. Not bad for a first attempt, now I just hope it carbonates and will taste good.