If you’ve ever siphoned gas from a car, you know what a miserable experience that is. Trying to get the flow started without letting that nasty stuff touch your lips is bad enough. The whole process is painstaking. Trying to siphon beer into bottles is even worse, and you don’t even get the payoff of joyriding afterwards.
The whole miserable process began with santizing my beer bottles. I’m too lazy to remove the labels from all of them, so I just left them on.
Half of the bottles.
You can see a light frosting along the mouths of the bottles. That’s priming sugar, which is supposed to support the carbonation of the beer while it sits in those bottles for the next ten days. I had to spoon a half teaspoon of the sugar into each of the 53 bottles I will be filling.
You can see how I'd be aprehensive about putting my mouth on anything looking like that.
Dante said that there is a special ring of hell for betrayers, but I’m going to go as far as to say that it is above the one reserved for whoever invented the siphoning rig. As Eric at the Athens Do It Yourself Shop explained it, I should have been able to get it started and then it would run by itself, siphoning and filling as long as I kept a little button on the end pushed down. That is definitely not what happened.
My first bottle. I named him Beery Larkin. Foolishly, I thought it would get easier.
The good old days.
It all went down hill from there. The siphon needed to be primed before every bottle, which involved sucking down flat proto-beer, and then it just up and stopped working. So I plan on stopping by the DIY shop tomorrow to find out why the hell the siphon doesn’t work. I’ll be damned if a machine gets the best of Andy Brownfield.
Help me name my beer! Leave your suggestions in a comment and in a future post I will put up a poll with all of the names. The winner gets a free six pack of this beer.
Mmmm... Six pack...
It’s really cool that you are making your homebrew for this blog, Andy (or perhaps it is the other way around? ha) but that is unfortunate that the siphoning isn’t working…I feel like for something like this people would have come up with a better system by now than siphoning to get the beer into individual bottles. The idea of giving away a free six-pack to the person that can come up with the best name is also a good idea, i’ll definitely post another comment with a name if I can think of a clever one! Good luck getting your siphon to work, I look forward to reading your next post to see what happens from here!
-Kelly
Thanks Kelly! I finally got it to work, but it was no easy process. It involved chocolate, a bottle of Pinot Grigio and Marvin Gaye, but that siphon finally sees things my way.
I look forward to hearing any name suggestions you have. I just hope the beer turns out good enough that winning a six pack is actually a prize instead of a punishment (but hey, maybe it works both ways).
I think it’s awesome that you’ve made your own… I can’t wait to hear how it ends up after the initial process of brewing and siphoning. It sounds like a rough kinda job…
I would come up with a name for your beer, but I seem to be out of creativity today. Granted, I’m also under 21 so winning the contest wouldn’t help much either haha.
Siphoning is definitely the toughest part, but it worked out in the end. Now it’s just a waiting game. That’s actually the hardest part. The irony is, I’ve sunk so much money into brewing my own beer, I can’t afford to drink.
I love the concept of making your own beer…I wish I had the patience! Like Alex said previously, seems like a somewhat tedious task.
As for names, i’m at a loss, too. The only titles that come to mind are “Beer-y, Beer-y Good” or “hops-in.”
Lame, I know! Haha. Good luck with the brew!
Thanks for the names Aimee! Sometimes the corniest are the best. It is tedious, but once I have 52 bottles of beer, it’ll (hopefully) be worth it (assuming the damn thing is even drinkable).