Bottling Day – Backyard Pilsner – Part One

Sunday, September 9, 2018

I took the four glass fermenting jars and added varying amounts of strawberries that had soaked overnight in vodka. The idea was to later bottle the beer individually out of these jars and figure out which ratio of strawberries to beer tasted best.

For some reason, final gravity measured 1.040, which was exactly the same as the original gravity. This made me question my ability to read the hydrometer. Either that, or the accuracy of the hydrometer.

The beer tasted strange – heavy and medicinal. That is not what I was expecting from a pilsner.

I prepared roughly 20% of a 5oz pack of priming sugar (calculated in tablespoons) and racked the remaining gallon of beer into the bottling bucket.

Bottling went smoothly. However, the capping did not. The butterfly capper that came with my brew kit didn’t grab these bottle necks properly. It was clamping metal plates directly against the bottle necks.

Fearing I would break or at least crack a bottle neck, I abandoned the capper. I had previously read someone else’s tale of having the same problem. Their emergency bottling day solution was to whack the removable capper bell with a rubber mallet.

I did the same.

No bottles were broken, but what a shit show…