Bottling the Porter

The porter cleared up pretty well in the secondary and the SG had held steady for a few days.  So it was time to bottle.

I just ordered this capper online.  Workers very well for a hand-held and you cant beat the price. 

After cleaning and sanitizing everything I prepared the corn sugar (helps create the carbonation) and siphoned the beer out of the secondary carboy and into the bottling bucket.

I did run into some trouble though.  I ended up being short on bottles.  These caps and capper only work on american style bottles. 
 
In the pic you can see an American style bottle on the right and a European style bottle on the left.  The difference looks pretty small but...

<---This is what happens with the European bottle

The caps don't grip and they can easily be knocked off, they hold up to the carbonation nor keep out the O2.  So I lost quite a bit of bottles this way and ended up searching around the joint for some other bottles that could be capped.   I found a few and also found that champagne bottles won't work (at least with this capper) even though they have a good lip for a cap because the neck has a bulge where the wire tie downs often rest. 



I ended up with 46 bottles total (minus what I drank while bottling) I threw the rest of the brew in a sanitized gallon jug.  I have been drinking from that to keep me from opening up too many bottles before the carbonation sets in (takes 2 weeks with the priming sugar).  The stuff still tastes great even though it is flat.  So I'm excited to see how it ends up here in a couple weeks.