I probably could have safely bottled my mild brew on Friday except that I didn’t have enough fully prepared bottles. Over past few days I have been pulling the empties out of my cupboards and removing the labels. The best way of doing this seems to be a soak in very hot water, peeling off the main label and then using a metal scouring pad to remove the final glue gunk from the outside.

I’m on holiday today so I took the collected bottles and, in a couple of batches soaked them in sterilising solution (diluted VWP) before giving a final rinse under hot water. I covered the tops with clingfilm to keep dust out while I got on with the remaining preparations. The picture above shows the beer sitting in  a second fermenting vessel (FV). This got it off the yeast layer at the bottom of the original FV and also let me see how much beer was available to bottle.

I had 15l and, with the Brewzor app I downloaded for my new phone, I calculated how much brewing sugar was needed to get a suitable level of carbonation for an English Mild. The answer was 35g, a lot less than the 65g that the half-teaspoon per pint beer-kit calculation would have netted (I was dubious about this figure as my first batch is definitely over-carbonated). I mixed that into the bulk amount rather than adding it to individual bottles and then, with Jane’s help, got it all bottled up.

What was left over had a pleasant taste and was measured as 1.012 at 20.5ºC, so unchanged from last week’s reading. Now to wait for it to condition in the bottles (although that will be eased by the fact that I still have a fair amount of the previous brew left, which although a bit fizzy is definitely improving with age).