Bottling: Kitchen Sink Saison

This afternoon my cousin and I bottled my most recent batch of homebrew, a saison. I'm calling this one "Kitchen Sink" saison because of the number of grains/fermentables  that went into it.  Saisons can have very simple grain bills, Saison Dupont for example (the golden standard of saisons), is supposedly brewed using 100% pilsner malt. This beer takes a bit more of a traditional, farmhouse approach, using pilsner, wheat, and rye malt, as well as some flaked oats and a little bit of sugar to help dry the beer out. The hops are a blend of Styrian Goldings, East Kent Goldings, and Saaz, right out of Phil Markowski's excellent Farmhouse Ales. I fermented this one with the Dupont yeast, taking advantage of the recent heat wave to get the temperature up at (and over) 90 degrees, which really kicks this strain into overdrive. Due to some losses, both in the boil kettle and the fermenter, I only ended up yielding about 3 gallons of beer, 34 bottles to be exact. The whole process took just over two hours from the beginning of set up to the end of clean up, and I'll crack the first bottle about a week from now to see how bottle conditioning is coming along.

Me (wearing my snazzy pink work gloves) siphoning the beer from the fermentation bucket to the bottling bucket, where a sugar solution is waiting to mix with the beer and serve as fuel for the yeast to naturally carbonate the beer

not the best view, but I'm siphoning the beer from the bottling bucket into empty bottles. There's a bottle wand at the end of the tubing that lets me control the flow of beer into the bottles

The other half of the assembly line, my cousin capping all the freshly filled bottles. Having a second person on hand makes the bottling process run much more smoothly