I’ve started homebrewing. I’ll post recipes at some point. But to start, photos of the all-important bottling and labeling step.
I’d been saving used bottles for the past year in anticipation of brewing some day, so I used a propped-open electric kettle to steam off the labels (most labels peel right off after about 15 seconds of steam, though some brands need a vigorous scrubbing to remove residual glue):
Baking bottles for 30 minutes at 180F to sterilize them:
After siphoning from the fermenter into a bottling bucket (not necessarily needed), I dropped 1-2 glucose/sucrose tablets in each bottle (for the yeast to ferment after bottling to produce the carbonation), and gravity-filled the motley crew of bottles:
The “Red Baron” capper is only $15 and easy to use:
And there I have it, about 40 capped beers:
Next, I printed out labels on a color laser printer (not inkjet). I’ve decided that my label style will be “some unrelated photo I took around the date of brewing” to anchor them in time, with minimal text and the eldash logo. After cutting them down on a paper cutter, I floated the backs on skim milk, applied them to the bottles, and smoothed them down. Milk makes a great low-tack glue to smooth surfaces and cleans off easily:
My first two batches, bottled (a photo of the bike path in Heron’s Head Park for a Summer IPA, and a photo of an abandoned couch at Warm Water Cove for the Rye ESB).
