Fill bottles

Okay, it's time to fill bottles. Attach one end of a sanitized length of siphon tubing to a sanitized bottling wand and the other end to the sanitized spigot on your bottling bucket.

Place several bottles in a row on the floor or (better yet) on the lower rack of your open dishwasher. You can line up as many as you're comfortable with, but many brewers fill 6 or 12 bottles at a time because they fit neatly into cardboard bottle carriers.

Open the spigot on the bottling bucket, and place the bottling wand into your first bottle. Press the tip lightly onto the bottom of the bottle to start the flow of beer. Keep an eye on it as the bottle fills so that it doesn't overflow!

When the beer just reaches the lip of the bottle, pull up on the wand and remove it from the bottle. The volume that the wand displaces leaves just the right amount of head space when you remove it from the bottle.

Continue this process until you have bottled the entire batch. You should get somewhere between 48 and 52 bottles out of a 5 gallon (19 liter) batch. If you don't have enough beer to fill the last bottle more than about 2/3 full, then drink the flat beer and discard the last bottle. Leaving too much head space in the bottle could lead to over-carbonation and an explosion!

On the next page, Steve will demonstrate how to fill your beer bottles.