NXNW Black Ale Stage 3

After letting the black ale ferment in the secondary fermenter for seven days, the batch stopped creating bubbles in the airlock, which indicated that the batch was done fermenting and ready for bottling. So I moved the secondary fermenter carboy to the top of the kitchen counter and started on the rest of the bottling preparation while the sediment settled back to the bottom of the carboy.

You can see the secondary fermentation created a small layer of sediment on the bottom of the carboy, but created much less sediment than the primary fermentation. While I let the sediment settle to the bottom of the carboy, I created my carbonation sugar water, which is 4.5 oz of priming sugar and two cups of water.

I brought the water up to a boil and added in the priming sugar, making sure to stir the sugar to prevent it from burning. Once the sugar was mixed in, I brought the sugar water up to a boil for a minute and then took it off the heat and let it cool down to 80 degrees F.

Once the priming sugar water cooled down to 80 degrees F, I poured it into the bottling bucket and positioned the bottling bucket to prepare it for siphoning.

Before I siphoned the black ale, I used the thief and the hydrometer to get a final gravity of the batch, so that I could calculate the alcohol content of the beer. The initial gravity of the batch was 1.055, which was exactly what was expected for the batch. Here you can see the final reading:

The final gravity came out to be 1.018, which is definitely within tolerance of the expected gravity of 1.014. These gravity readings mean that the alcohol content of the beer is: (1.055 - 1.018) x 131 = 4.8 %, which is much less than the 7% of the bavarian hefeweizen, which we will be able to compare when tasting the black ale. After returning the beer from the thief, I started to siphon the batch from the secondary fermenter to the bottling bucket, which also mixed the batch with the priming sugar water.

As you can see, the thick walled 3/8 inch tubing worked perfectly again, even giving me the ability to walk away from the siphon and take an overall picture. From here on out I plan on just starting the siphon and walking away, since it seems that the siphon filter and the tubing will do everything I need to make sure the beer is properly siphoned. While the siphon moved the batch to the bottling bucket, I started to prepare the bottles and caps for bottling.

As opposed to the Bavarian Hefeweizen Stage 3 where I used two cases of store bought bottles to bottle the batch, this time I was able to use bottles that I had been saving from six packs of store bought beer I had purchased throughout a few weeks to bottle the black ale. I was able buy bottles of beer (non-screw off top bottles, they don’t have a good re-bottling lip to them) throughout the week and boil the bottles for about 10 minutes, which completely sterilizes the bottles. Not only does it sterilize the bottles, it also tends to remove all labels from the bottles, providing a nice, clean, unlabeled bottle to use for bottling. This is a great way to save money on bottles, by reusing either store bought bottles or six pack beer bottles, you can prevent from having to buy two additional cases of bottles for each batch. I did use store bought bottles to supplement the extra bottles I would need for bottling the full batch.

As a final note, if you buy beer that is in special bottles, such as the Hoegaarden bottles, you can add a little variety to your bottling. Once the siphon was done moving the beer to the bottling bucket, I moved the bottling bucket to the counter top, put a drip pan below the bottle filler, and turned the nozzle, to allow the beer to fill the bottle filler.

Once you have your bottling station all ready, you can go ahead and pull up a chair and start filling your bottles. I like to keep empty bottles in reach and just put the on the counter until I have all of the bottles filled and ready to be capped.

Filling the bottles takes just about ten minutes to bottle an entire batch if you don’t have to move around too much. Once you have all of your bottles filled, go ahead and start capping the bottles. I like to test a few bottles and make sure they have an airtight cap on them:

Once you have all of your bottles filled and capped, you can go ahead and put them in a dry, dark place to carbonate. I put the bottles back into their six packs and put them in the pantry, where they would carbonate and age for at least four weeks until they were ready to drink.