We realize that many of the brewers who will visit this site will be keggers. At the volumes typically produced by the average brewer, kegging is an inevitability. But small batch brewers and keggers alike will no doubt bottle. As we know, bottles may be the best vessels in which to package low oxygen beer. They are, at the end of the day, the packaging vessel with the least ingress of oxygen.

Yet packaging in bottles at the homebrewer level is full of obstacles. Here we propose a few methods by which the homebrewer can package in bottles while eliminating the threat of oxidation on the cold side.

“Bottle Spunding”

The simplest way to ensure that oxygen ingress into the bottles is mitigated or totally eliminated, is to bottle with remaining extract directly off the fermenter. The drawback here is that you will be unable to eliminate the yeast in suspension from the finished beer, meaning clarity may be an issue. The upside is the total lack of oxygen due to the scavenging affect of active yeast.

We outline the process of calculating the amount of residual extract needed in our Blog post, “Why do we Spund?“.

Bottling with Speise

Here we let the beer ferment to final gravity. By saving some of the same wort from the batch and dosing it inline when we bottle, we are providing fermentable extract to the beer with the same composition. The remaining yeast in suspension will be much less than if we bottled directly off of the fermenter and we will thus have clearer beer as a result. Dosing should be done with great care to eliminate excessive oxygen ingress.