Beer Machine bottling

TBM: < 0.1 bubbles/second. Bottling day. TBM kit doesn’t give bottling instructions – just says put fermenter in fridge for 4-5 days for clarification. So I decided to try both their instructions and bottling.

I started a quest a few days ago to find swing top brown bottles. About $3-4 each online (empty), so I found some beers at Weaver Street Market instead for about the same – may as well get some beer thrown into the deal! The following were available in brown swing tops:

Fischer Amber – a fairly dull amber biere d’alsace

Highland Brewing Cold Mountain Winter Ale – interesting spices – root beer??? Nice big 1L bottle

Schwartz – Dark Bavarian lager – pleasant, dry.

I also have a clear 750ml French lemonade bottle

I cleaned the bottles by thoroughly shaking with washing-up liquid and hot water, and rinsed 3 times with hot water. I sanitized with oxiclean. 1 scoop per gallon solution. Oxiclean produces a lot of gas (oxygen) when shaken in solution. I rinsed the oxiclean several times.

I primed with cane sugar. I used http://www.indata.com/collectionsoft/mybrewcollection/bp0.html to calculate weight of sugar to put in my bottles (500ml, 650ml, 750ml and 1l). I decided to try to obtain carbonation volume of 2.0, and guessed average priming temp to be 70degF. According to http://www.joyofbaking.com/sugar.html, 1 tsp of cane sugar is 4g, so we have the following measures for each bottle:

Bottle size (ml)	Priming sugar (g)	Priming sugar (tsp)
500	2.23	0.5575
650	2.89	0.7225
750	3.34	0.835
1000	4.45	1.1125

Feeling homesick, I went to Total Wine and bought some Fullers (London Pride, ESB, London Porter) and a Young’s Special London Ale. Ooh I love the subtle dry hoppiness of British beer!