Packaging & Carbonating

Bottling

1. Use the TastyBrew Bottle Priming Calculator to determine how much sugar or other priming fermentable you need for your volume of beer and carbonation level.
2. Carefully measure by weight the amount of priming sugar. Prepare the priming solution by boiling it for 10 minutes in about 1 cup of filtered water. 
3. Sanitize the bottling bucket, bottles, autosiphon, bottling wand, caps, and any other piece of equipment that will come into contact with the beer.
• I use Star-San since it does not need to be rinsed and can be stored for multiple uses over several batches of beer. Star-San foams quite a lot but getting some foam or a few drop of sanitizer in your beer will not hurt the finished product.
• I wear rubber kitchen gloves (not used for anything but brewing) when handling Star-San because I find it dries out my skin a lot.
4. Pour the boiled priming solution into the bottling bucket. I usually let it cool down before doing so. While it cools keep the lid on the pot so that the sugary water is not exposed to microbes in the air.
5. If the beer has been conditioning for a long time, it may be a good idea to add some yeast since the original yeast may have sunk to the bottom of the secondary, leaving too little in the beer to carbonate it.
• After aging my Barleywine for 3 months, I added half a pack of rehydrated Nottingham yeast to the bottling bucket. This may be excessive, but I do not want to have a flat beer, especially after storing it for so long!
6. Siphon the beer into the bottling bucket. Do not splash it or aerate it. Stick the end of the siphon tube under the surface of the beer to minimize air exposure.
• Siphon until you start to get trub or hop gunk into the beer. You may need to tip the fermenter over a little to get all of the clear beer, but when you do so be careful not to disturb the trub / hop gunk at the bottom of the fermenter.
7. When the siphon is complete, gently stir the beer so that the priming solution is evenly distributed through the liquid. You do not want some bottles to be more highly carbonated than others. 
8. Get a sanitized bottle. Place it under the bottling wand so that the wand is open. Then open the spigot on the bottling bucket.
• I do it this way so that the air in the spigot and bottling wand will not bubble up through the beer but will be forced out through the top of the first bottle.
9. Continue to fill each bottle.
10. You may need to tip the bottling bucket over to get as much of the beer as possible into bottles. It helps to have an assistant with this.
11. When complete, cap the bottles using the wing-capper. 
• I have broken the necks of some bottles. Be careful. When that happens you can either discard the beer or gently pour it into a new bottle. A sanitized funnel is handy here. Be aware that the beer treated this way may have quality issues due to exposure to the air. 
12. When you finish capping all the bottles, put them in a dark closet at room temperature. About a week later they should be carbonated, though some beers may take a bit longer to carbonate.  

Kegging

1. Thoroughly clean and sanitize kegs, including the dip tube and posts.
2. Rack beer into keg using sanitized auto-siphon.
3. Carbonate, with three options:
1. For ales, use a priming solution similar to bottle conditioning (to save CO2). Wait about a week, then crash-cool.
2. For ales that have been aging a long time, add 1/4 a packet of yeast along with priming solution. Wait about a week, then crash-cool.
3. For lagers, force carbonate, since keg-conditioning requires the beer to be at around room temp, and after lagering, not much yeast will be left in solution, and it will take a while to carbonate.
4. Put keg in temp controlled freezer or kegorator, wait for force carbonation to be complete, then drink.
5. The first 2 pints or so will be cloudy, but afterwards the beer will be clear.