Last night we bottled our first batch of OA beer. It was pretty awesome to see our experiment limping idly towards success. The beer turned out to be much lighter than it appeared while fermenting in the carboy, but it was pretty remarkable how much like beer this strange concoction actually looked.

We siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket where we had 2/3 cups dextrose dissolved in a pint of water. Adding our bottling tube we opened the spigot and proceeded to… for the love of Christ… crouch down on the floor for the next 45 freaking minutes to fill our bombers with beer. This sucked. Totally friggin’ terrible this crouching bullshit was. I didn’t threaten Jesus to make sure I was born white in America so that I could spend my time away from work bending over and actually straining for something. That was never part of the deal, thank you very much.

No, never again will I labor like that for my delicious godly brew. Bump that.

Fortunately, there is a better way, a less strenuous path towards homebrew inebriation. For our next batch I will be kegging the beer and not bothering with the bottling and capping nonsense that was the bane of my existence yesterday. Next time, I’m just going to dump the beer into a keg, close it up and throw that delicious nectar into my kegerator and be done with it.

The only problem I foresee now is getting my Sanke coupler to adapt to a Cornelius keg. Well, apparently the nice folks at kegconnection.com have managed to come up with a solution for this, allowing your liquid and gas lines to switch easily between Sanke and Cornelius. Check out the video below for all the wonderful details.

Brew & Grow is hosting the 11th Annual Teach Your Friend to Homebrew Day here in beautiful Chicago. The event will go from noon until 4pm at the Brew & Grow store at 1824 N. Besly Ct.

View Larger Map

Our first batch of OA Bitter is kicking and screaming it’s way through the birthing process as I write this, so it’s time for me to start thinking about bottling this stuff for the second fermentation.

One seriously important step in the bottling process is getting the beer out of the carboy, away from the yeast sediment and kreuzen, and into our bottling bucket that will be filled with a bit of dextrose.

To do this we’re going to be using what the ancients referred to as a Racking Cane. I know there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m going to leave that for you low-brow enthusiasts at home to mine.

So here’s a nice little video explaining the sanitation, priming and use of a racking cane. This guy from homebrewingvideo.com runs a little tighter ship then our friend from the previous beer sequence, but his information is good none-the-less.

For extra credit can you name the Replacements song at the beginning of the video? Do you know what 80′s movie it was featured in?

I like this guy’s style and his laid back approach to the process of home brewing beer. I’m starting with a Malt extract so we’ll be skipping these first two steps. He also skips the yeast starting, which I think is helpful, so I’ll post another video with that in the future.

The Mash:

The Sparge:

The Boil:

Chilling the Wort:

Putting It to Bed: