Secondary Fermentation

So our beer has stopped bubbling a lot and so it was time to transfer our beer from our bucket to the glass carboy, which will house our beer for the next couple of days. We had been planning on making another batch of beer, but due to Eric coming down with the plague we were unable to do that. So I simply transferred the beer and we are holding off until later this week.

Anyway, here is the setup of the transfer:

This is what the inside of the bucket looked like:


The first step is to start the siphon, which basically just means that I suck on the tube and start the beer coming out the tube, and I used that to fill up our test tube so that we could take a hydrometer reading. And then I attached the tube to the little filler thing and stuck it in the bucket. The siphon looks like this:


The whole process took about 20 minutes and the end result of the bucket was... this:


It looks a bit.... uh... well it looks just a tad gross. But I am glad that the beer is no longer in that junk. Look at the nice clean carboy of beer! I managed to get a little bit of the gunk in there, but hardly any.... which is good.


So I moved the carboy into the closet and Sprinkles checked out the new addition. I wrapped it with a blanket, cleaned the other stuff and tidied up from the process.


The hydrometer reading was a lot lower than before and I am not sure exactly what that means. After we were done boiling the max alcohol % that we could get was 7.5% and now it is about 3.5%. But the taste that I had was actually pretty good which was encouraging. It just might not be very alcoholic.