Bottling day

No, not the beer I brewed up yesterday - it takes a bit more time than that! But the wheat beer has done its two weeks in the secondary fermentor so it's time to bottle it. I used to use large bottled water containers to bottle my beer but it looked terrible and was never very effective - plus it meant I had to drink the beer 5 litres at a time. So this time I splashed out on some flip-top glass bottles.

Sampling the young beer is a perk of brewing and it was interesting tasting the beers that were conditioned in different ways. The orange peel & coriander didn't really taste of much - its taste was even cleaner taste than the demijohns without any extra additives. The hopped batch had the best 'foretaste', but it was still pretty bland. Hopefully a couple of weeks in the bottle will help, but to be fair all I did was mix a brew kit so I shouldn't be hoping for too much.
The Witches Brew is looking very happy with a nice fluffy yeast head and plentiful bubbling from the airlock
I think I know why the sugar yield was low though - the hot water I used in the mash process was used to heat up the esky as well as the grain, and this probably took a good4 or 5 degrees away. Next time I'll pre-heat the esky with near-boiling water as well.
Saying that it's important in homebrew to pace yourself & not get too carried away. I have 4 gallons of wheat beer in 24 bottles that needs to sit for at least two weeks, and 4 gallons of Witches Brew that will need to be racked off in a week and will be ready for bottling a couple of weeks later. That's a lot of beer and a lot of bottles. I have some really interesting recipes I want to try (eg proper ginger beer from a ginger beer plant, watermelon wheat beer & gruit beer) as well as working on getting a better sugar yield with some of the other real beer recipes. But unless I want to bury myself in bottles I need to relax and let the existing beer mature. In time a natural cycle should develop.