Bottling / Kegging

Ok, your beer has finished fermenting and is ready for the next step. This brings a choice: do you want to bottle your beer or put it into a keg? There are several varieties of bottles and kegs, so you have plenty of choices. Before you bottle or keg your beer, you must make sure whatever you are using (bottles, caps, kegs, etc) is sanitized.

Before you put your beer into a bottle or a keg, you need to add some priming sugar to it. The reason for this is the priming sugar causes a secondary fermentation that gives your beer carbonation. Using the Mr. Beer system, the most effective way I've found is the following:

The nice thing about bottling is you have your beer in single serving amounts, so you can enjoy some without worrying about the rest going flat. This also makes giving beer as gifts to your friends an option (and what friends you'll make by giving beer! hehe). I've put batches in glass bottles ranging from the 7oz "pony" size to some slightly larger than a pint. With glass bottles, you'll need to have plenty of metal bottle caps and a bottle capper available. Mr. Beer has these available for sale on their website. The drawback of bottling your beer is your time to prepare the bottles through cleaning and sanitation is a lot longer, and there's the need to keep a steady supply of bottle caps around.

You may see some directions regarding putting the sugar directly into the bottles or kegs. I'd avoid this approach. Sure, it will give you carbonated beer, but the carbonation will be more like a soft drink (larger bubbles that dissapear quickly). I've used the steps I mentioned above for several years, and the carbonation is much more of what you would expect from beer (smaller bubbles, a head that lasts awhile).

Now that you've primed the beer, you're ready for bottling or kegging. I've tried a few approaches to this, here are the results I've had from the different methods I've tried:

At one point I decided I had enough with the hassles of bottling and decided to purchase a mini keg system. The kegs for this system held 5 liters (approximately 1.25 gallons), and used a pump with a CO2 cartridge. The benefit of putting the beer in a keg like this is the cleaning/sanitation time is greatly reduced. A drawback, one that eventually got me to stop using these kegs, is it is difficult to gauge the correct amount of priming sugar to use when putting beer in a mini keg. Often times the beer would be over carbonated and would basically come out as foam. Also, the beer stored with this method will tend to go flat much quicker (that is, once the keg is opened). Often times the beer would be over carbonated and would basically come out as foam. While it can be fun at a party with a mini keg just full of beer, I think this approach is not the best.

I tried using plastic 2 Liter soft drink bottles to fill with beer and have been very happy with the results. First, the bottles are fairly easy to come by (just buy a 2 liter of your favorite soft drink and keep the bottle when you're finished). Second, you can reuse the plastic cap so there is no need to purchase caps. Third, with the large volume, you won't be filling as many bottles. I find a batch made with the Mr. Beer kit will fill one 2 liter with enough beer left over to fill a few glass bottles of the 12oz variety. I will say this approach is good for a party, as the beer will go flat not long after you open the bottle. But, if you've got a party with enough people over that love your killer pale ale brew - you might not be worrying about having leftover beer anyway ;)