Our Amber Ale is bottled! And it has a name...

Please. Read the warning.

Last night, Dana and I bottled our Amber Ale. Lauren and I gave it its name, though in a strange fashion. When I was texting her about our preliminary brew, I described it as a "bare-bones Amber", because that's what it was. We weren't dicking around with the recipe in the least. It was a stock ale. In trying to come up with a name for the beer, she recalled that I had used an interesting adjective to describe it in a text message, but neither of us could recall what it was. I dug through my phone and found the sent message in question, and thus Bare Bones Amber was named.

Keep it safe.

We had heard, going in, that bottling was the most tedious and unfun part of the brewing process. Dana came over around 5:30 and we got to work sanitizing all our bottles -- two dozen 22oz bottles and two dozen 12oz bottles. In the bathtub. We used the absurdly dangerous sounding cleanser that came with the equipment, and while we were pretty sure that it was deluded enough to not be harmful, we still wore protective eyewear. Then we did the bottling bucket and the bottling equipment, which was a considerably quicker endeavor than the bottles. We set everything out to dry, and we put the priming sugar on the stove to boil.

Straight outta the prohibition.

We hoisted the fermenting bucket onto the counter, and set the bottling bucket beneath it. We peeled off the lid to the fermenting bucket and were greeted with a very delicious, beery smell. We started the siphon and into the bottling bucket that beer did go. We lost a few ounces of beer in the process, not due to spillage, but rather to the spigot on the bottling bucket being open. Oops. The beer flowing into the bottling bucket was a nice healthy yellow-copper color, just as it was supposed to be. Once the fermenter was empty, we moved the bottling bucket to the countertop and attached the bottling equipment. Stationed on the floor, Dana filled and I capped. It took us perhaps 45 minutes to finish the job, and it was, to our surprise, a very delightful period of time. We used all twenty-four 22oz bottles and eight 12oz bottles, putting us somewhere in the range of 620oz of beer. The sense of accomplishment when we were finished was quite excellent.

As we cleaned up, we realized that we should label the first beer we bottled. We had set it aside immediately after capping it, and I quickly grabbed a piece of paper, a sharpie, and a pair of scissors. In lieu of a fancy-schmancy label, I traced my phone on the paper in pencil, wrote "Bare Bones Amber #1 7/23/2010" and then cut it out. At this point, I went in the fridge and took out the bottle of milk, which confused Dana a bit. I put a bit of milk on the back of the makeshift label and stuck it, albeit crookedly, on the bottle. And with that, our first brew was complete. We are giving it roughly 3 weeks to condition, which means it will be served on or around August 20th.