Porter Bottling, Tasting and Drinking

It's been a while since I have posted anything on here. Wasn't much happening in the garden over the winter. Things are starting to get going again at this time of year but first I decided to tidy up one of the loose ends from last year. I had been brewing a batch of porter for Christmas. It wasn't quite ready for Christmas but had a bottle or two around New Year's. I will get to that but first up is the bottling of the porter.

When I left off I had a batch of porter in my glass carboy. Once that had cleared I was ready to bottle it. I bought some nice dark glass old fashioned bottles which I thought would look good for the porter. I could have used some bottles that I had saved but I will probably need those for the cider in a few weeks. Also I thought these bottles really looked the part.

My new bottles

When I ordered the bottles from the homebrew shop I also added a bottling bucket. This is a large bucket which holds all the beer and has a special tap which makes it easier to fill bottles. It was cheap enough and definitely made the job a lot easier.

My new bottling bucket

Transferring to the bottling bucket

Once the bucket was filled I added some sugar so that when in the bottle the beer would ferment a little bit again creating CO2 creating some "fizz" in the beer. Porter isn't very carbonated so I only needed a small amount of sugar. There are online calculators that work out the amount needed so no need for confusing formulas. If I hadn't got the bottling bucket it would mean adding a very small amount of sugar to each bottle which gets very messy. This is a much better option. Once the sugar has been disolved in the beer its time to bottle. The tap on the bottling bucket has a valve on the bottom which only allows beer to flow when it is pushed up. So pushing a bottle up onto the tube opens the valve and the beer flows. Once the bottle is full you simply take it away on the beer stops.

Adding the priming sugar

The filled bottles

Once the bottles have been filled it's time to cap them. This is pretty straight forward. You use a special piece of equipment for it. Put the caps in it and push them on and you have sealed bottles.

The bottle capper

A capped bottle

The finished article

Once the bottles were finished I left them for two weeks, by a radiator, to ferment and carbonate the beer. I opened one and it was still flat so I left them another few weeks for aging/carbonation. After this they were ready. The finished beer had a lovely taste, some chocolate and coffee flavours but not over powering. It also had a good head on it which did tend to die off after a few minutes. This seems to be normal with a porter, so it just means not pouring it all first time and leaving a little to add half way through the pint to liven it up again. I have been doing my best not to drink it too quickly. At the time of writing I have 8 bottles left. I would definitely make this again, but definitely a bigger batch next time.




I am already thinking about my next batch of beer. It will probably be an Indian Pale Ale, something light and refreshing for the summer. That is probably a few weeks away yet. All the spare cash has gone on some timber for raised beds this week. Hopefully I should be putting them together this weekend. I also have an update on the prosciutto I started in October which I should be posting in the next few days.

Until Then.