Little bottler

Ady

I always bottle my lager and cider brews and always use a little bottler ( a great little piece of kit ) rather than transferring the brew to another vessel or using a syphoning tube, it saves time and is less messy, but as some of your other home brewers have stated, sediment getting into the bottles can be a small annoyance. Would it be possible for the little bottler to come with a small filter fitted to filter all the sediment out, or is the sediment too fine, or is some of it needed to enable secondary fermentation in the bottle after priming with sugar?
Or is there another answer to avoid getting sediment in bottles?

HBO_Staff

Sediment can be a nuisance for the home brewer, it would be quite difficult to filter it out when using the little bottler though. By far the best thing to do is to minimise it in the first place. There are two practical good ways to do this, firstly use a good yeast which compacts the sediment well, we find the Danstar range to be good at this, and this means that the yeast will settle to the bottom and stay there, and doesn't stir up as easily, so by carefully syphoning and leaving as much behind in the primary vessel this will reduce the amount in the bottles. (This does mean discarding the standard yeast which comes with the beer kit and getting a better quality yeast separately).

Secondly, it's a little more hassle, but we use this system and it works well; use a two stage fermenting vessel process. If you ferment in a standard vessel with no tap/little bottler, and after it has finished fermenting carefully syphon over with a length of tube over in to a second fermenting vessel, but this time the second vessel already has the little bottler fitted to it. Then leave it to settle again for a couple of days, and then fill your bottles using the little bottler in the usual way. By doing this you have minimised the amount of sediment in the second vessel with the little bottler, and then left even more behind when filling the bottles. Again this should be done carefully to avoid disturbing any sediment that got through into the second vessel. We find this leaves almost no sediment in the bottles of the finished brew.

You do need yeast present for secondary fermentation in the bottles when you add the priming sugar, and this is what carbonates the brew, and this will naturally happen .

Ady

Thanks HBO, will give the "syphoning into a second fermenting vessel" a go. Which yeast would you recommend for Coopers Mexican Cerveza?

HBO_Staff

Coopers lagers are best suited to the Nottingham style from the Danstar range, which is the one we've used on quite a few lagers here with very good results, and it produced a good, well compacted sediment that did not stir up easily;

http://home-brew-online.myshopify.com/collections/all/products/nottingham-ale-yeast