Bottling day: priming, patience and the neighbours
Bottling is the least glamorous three hours in brewing and the easiest place to spoil a beer that has behaved impeccably for a fortnight. It is also the only part of the process with an audience, which changes how carefully it gets done.
| Brewed | 14 June 2026 |
|---|---|
| Written up | 25 August 2026 |
| Into the fermenter | 19 litres |
| Mash held at | 66 °C for 60 min |
| Cellar on the day | 15 °C |
| Original gravity | 1.040 |
| Final gravity | 1.008 |
| Strength | 4.2 % by volume |
FG 1.008OG 1.040
Read with a hydrometer at twenty degrees, at the kitchen table, before anything got washed.
01 / 04
Everything washed the day before
Fifty bottles take considerably longer to prepare than the beer takes to fill them. Mine come back from the neighbours over the months between batches, soak overnight in a tub in the bath until the labels let go, get scrubbed inside with a brush, rinsed twice and left upside down on a rack. All of that happens the day before bottling rather than on the morning, because a bottle still wet inside dilutes the sanitiser that goes into it, and diluted sanitiser is decoration.
Caps go out of the bag straight into a bowl of sanitiser and stay there until they are needed. The siphon and the bottling wand soak in the same solution for twenty minutes and then go onto a clean towel, never into the sink, which is comfortably the dirtiest object in the flat. None of this is interesting and all of it is why batches stopped going wrong. The afternoon runs off a list I do not deviate from, mostly because I know what I am like by four o'clock.
Off the card
- Bottles washed and dried the day before, never on the morning
- Caps soaking in sanitiser from the start of the session
- Siphon and wand on a clean towel, not in the sink
- Anything dropped goes back in the bucket, no exceptions
02 / 04
Priming sugar, weighed for the batch
Priming sugar is weighed on a kitchen scale against the volume actually in the fermenter, which is never the twenty litres written at the top of the card. Trub and hydrometer samples take a litre or more, and the gap between eighteen and twenty litres works out at about a tenth of a volume of carbonation. That is small on its own and it stacks with a cellar that warms up in spring. The sugar is boiled in a cup of water, cooled, and stirred into the bottling bucket before any beer arrives.
Stirring after the beer is in is where oxygen gets its chance, so the order matters more than the technique. Sugar first, beer siphoned in gently over the top of it, one slow turn with a sanitised spoon and nothing further. A crate that ends up unevenly carbonated has almost always had a lazy mix, and you discover it six weeks later when one bottle is flat and the next one climbs out of the neck. Wheat beers get slightly less than the calculator suggests, because July in the cellar does part of the work.
03 / 04
Filling, capping and the crate on the floor
Filling goes fastest with the bucket on the kitchen table and the crate on a chair below it: wand down to the bottom of the bottle, fill to the neck, withdraw and leave the gap the wand displaces. A capper on the corner of the table and a rhythm of four bottles at a time puts fifty away in about forty minutes. Every cap gets a dot of marker with the batch number on it, because unlabelled bottles in a dark cellar turn into a lottery inside two months.
The crate goes down the ladder and sits on the cellar floor rather than the shelf, where the temperature is steadiest and nothing can roll. Two weeks at cellar temperature carbonates most beers and three are needed if the cellar is under ten degrees, because the yeast works slower in the cold and there is no hurrying it along. The test bottle comes out on day ten and is opened over the sink. A sigh rather than a hiss means another week and no further thought.
04 / 04
Friday on the landing
The beer goes up the stairs on a Friday, four or six bottles in a bag, and gets drunk on the landing or at somebody's kitchen table alongside whatever is in the fridge. That is the entire distribution system and it has never needed improving. The people drinking it are not brewers, which makes their opinions more useful than they realise. Nobody tells me the hop character is muddled. They tell me it is too bitter for a hot day, or that the dark one tastes like bread.
Those comments go on the back of the card in the words they were said in. Over five years the plainest of them have shaped these recipes more than anything I have read. One neighbour has said of every farmhouse batch since 2022 that it reminds her of what her father used to make in the village, and she says it in a tone that is not entirely a compliment. I have never worked out which part of the beer she means, and I keep brewing them.