Brewing Beer : Step by Step

A day or two before bottling, move your fermenter up to a table. To siphon, the vessel you are emptying must be above the top of the vessel to which you are siphoning. If you move the fermenter a day or so before you siphon, you will allow any sediment you stirred up to resettle.

If you have never run a siphon before, you should practice this a few times with plain water. First, slide your sanitized 6-foot vinyl siphon hose on to the short (or “handle”) end of your racking cane. Sanitize and rinse the assembly, then fill it with clean water, keeping your nice, clean thumb over the hose end. Then, invert the cane and plunge it smoothly into your fermenter or practice water vessel. When you lower the hose end to below the tabletop where your “siphoning from” vessel is, liquid will flow downhill and out the end of the hose.

Once you can do this smoothly, boil one to two cups of water and add your two-thirds cup of corn sugar. Boil for 10 minutes, until the sugar is fully dissolved and you know you have a sterile solution. Pour this into your sanitized bottling vessel, and siphon the beer on top, stirring it gently to mix in the priming solution. (The first liquid, water in the hose and cane, can be caught in a small jar and thrown away – you will see the color change as the beer flows down the line.) Leave most of the thick layer of sediment behind in the fermenter – you’ll clean it out after your crown caps are crimped on.

Now, lift the priming vessel to the table and restart your siphon to fill sanitized bottles. You can use a bottle filler with a spring-loaded valve on the end, but crimping the flow as one bottle fills before moving to the next bottle and uncrimping can work well. Fill each bottle to about one inch of headspace below the top, and crimp on a sanitized crown cap. Then, just keep the bottles at room temperature for another 10 days or so, while the yeast consumes the priming sugar, and chill a couple down! When you pour, leave the yeast sediment behind in the bottle.

Your beer will be natural and could not possibly be fresher. It will have hops that you chose because you liked the aroma or the name. It will help you determine what you like, so you can move toward your ideal on your next batch. It will most likely be among the best beers you ever tried.