What better way to celebrate the long weekend than with some good-ole-fashioned bottling (followed by leisurely drinking)?

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to The Wandering Badger a.k.a., my new brew.  Just like Wisconsin’s stead-fast state animal, my curiosity for the science of fermentation was sparked a fortnight ago when I began my adventures in home brewing -starting with a classic American-style Brown Ale, loaded with citrusy Cascade Hops.

Although for my first home brew I followed the instructions to a “T” (experimenting only with ingredients), I was slightly worried about the adding (pitching) of the yeast.  While yeast crave unfermented sugar, turning it promptly into alcohol and carbon dioxide, I added my hungry little friends too late and into a hostile hot wort.  To make the situation more stressful, my fermentation gauge (airlock) was exhibiting no signs of activity while it resided in my laundry room.

Alas – after two weeks of waiting, the bottling (and inital tasting) day had arrived.  Before unleashing The Wandering Badger from its fermentation bin, my brewing-comrade Stewart and best-friend from Wisconsin Mandi, sanitized the living daylights out of several glass and plastic bottles that I picked up from Toronto’s Fermentations.

Any good home brewing book will tell you that sanitation is next to godliness. In fact, in his home brewing bible “How to Brew” the legendary John J. Palmer says “the most important thing for success in brewing is good cleaning and sanitation”.  Even the slightest exposure to bacteria and “wild yeasts” could cause your beer brewing to take an unforgettable turn.  Palmer recommends several products to clean and sanitize equipment, bottles and caps, but I used 1 tablespoon of powdered bleach dissolved into 1 gallon of bath-tub warm water.

After disinfecting everything in sight, it was time to prepare the yeast’s last supper.  What gives beer its refreshing carbonation is a last minute addition of sugar, dissolving carbon dioxide into the beer and completing a last minute fermentation.  Being a good-little foodie, I used one cup of local honey and two cups of water dissolved together over an open stove.

Now it was time to slowly expose the beer-in-question to the open air for the first time, taking our first wiff of the murky brown substance. To my pleasant surprise, not only did my beer not smell like ketchup, and it also offered a strong hop aroma associated with the Cascade Hops.  AND, for an un-carbonated warm “beer” (we can now call it beer), upon first sip The Wandering Badger exhibited a dark alcohol warmth – my first home brew had fermented!

After adding the dissolved honey to the fermentation bucket, the three of us took turns filling up and capping 47 plastic and glass bottles.  Bottling took much less time than the original boiling of the wort, in fact we were all cleaned up within 2 hours of starting the process.

So, the Wandering Badger is now in the home stretch. Over the next two weeks or so, it will reside once again in the comfort of the laundry room, waiting for the day it is properly carbonated.  Stop back soon for part 3, the grand finale – the unleashing of The Wandering Badger!