How to Bottle a Home Brewed English Mild Beer

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment, we are going to be talking about what we need to be doing to get ready for bottling besides just cleaning our bottles. Now that our bottles are soaking in their sanitation solution, we're going to focus on taking a specific gravity from our beer. So, this is going to be our final gravity measurement. We're going to use our sterilized thief and take a sample. With our final gravity measurement, we are aiming for something that is roughly 25% of what we started with. So if we had a beer that started with a 1.040, we are going to be aiming for something that is 1.010, or 25% less. If it's a little above this or a little below this, don't worry, you are still going to be fine. One tip on taking your measurement is, right before you take it, give it a little tap and that will knock some of the little bubbles off and give you a more accurate measurement. After you've taken your final specific gravity measurement, you can subtract that from your original gravity measurement and multiply the result by one-hundred and thirty-one and that will give you your final alcohol content in "Alcohol by volume." Now we are going to start worrying about getting our priming sugar and our bottle caps ready to be used. So, we are going to start heating enough water to cover up about sixty bottle caps. And for the priming sugar, we are going to add about a pint of water into a nice small pot and start heating that up. When we get ready, we are going to be adding three-quarters of a cup of priming sugar. This will give us our carbonation. When we've gotten our bottle cap sterilizing water to a boil, we are going to add our bottle caps and boil them for roughly 5 to 10 minutes to sterilize them. When your primer sugar water is boiling, your going to add your priming sugar and stir it in so that it forms a solution. And you're going to want this to boil for about five minutes to sterilize. After that, you're going to want to put a lid on it. With our priming sugar ready and covered off to the side, we're next going to start siphoning into our bottling bucket the way that I showed you in the earlier segment. As the beer begins to flow in, you add your priming sugar water gently to the bottom. As the water or as the beer siphons in, this will mix in the priming sugar creating a nice homogeneous solution. You can cover it up with your lid to provide a little extra protection from any dust. Now that it has all been racked into our bottling bucket, we're going to attach the lid on for sure and then lift it up and put it on our counter. And now, we are about ready for bottling."