Small batch brewing offers many advantages: you can brew with limited space and equipment, test a new recipe, or divide a batch into smaller batches for experimentation. But one of the challenges with brewing small batches is bottling one gallon of beer. Bottling buckets are made for bottling five gallons at a time. Since the spigot is positioned above the bottom of the bucket, it’s normal to lose a bit of beer, and for a five-gallon batch that’s no big loss. But when just bottling one gallon, we want to maximize the amount of beer, mead, or cider we get from the batch and the task becomes a little awkward.
So what’s the most efficient way to bottle a one-gallon batch? Here are a few options and some tips for small batch brewing:

1. Build a mini-bottling bucket – Some homebrewers take a smaller food-grade bucket and convert it into a mini-bottling bucket. Simply drill a hole into a two-gallon, food-grade bucket and install a spigot. Then just follow normal bottling procedures, siphoning your beer and mixing the priming sugar in this smaller bucket.

2. Fill from a pot – Some like to transfer these small batches into a pot and siphon into bottles from there. This can be especially helpful if you need to add priming sugar. Just prepare the priming sugar in the pot, siphon your beer onto the priming sugar, and then siphon out into the bottles.

3. Use a clamp or stopcock – These nifty devices will take the guesswork out of how to stop the flow while siphoning and will allow you to accurately fill each bottle with minimal spillage. Be sure to leave some space (about an inch) at the top of each bottle.

4. Use a mini auto-siphon – It can be a little tricky using a full-size racking cane or auto-siphon when transferring a one-gallon batch. The mini auto-siphon is made just for this purpose and fits perfectly into one-gallon jugs.

5. Transfer to the bottling bucket as usual – If all else fails, you can just bottle as usual. Just know that you’ll have to tilt the bucket to get every last drop. You’ll likely end up with a small amount or beer leftover – drink up!

Small batch brewing is a great way to experiment with homebrewing without making a huge investment in ingredients or equipment. To convert a five-gallon recipe into a one-gallon recipe, simply divide the ingredients by 5. And now that you have the tips above, bottling one gallon of beer, mead or cider should be a piece of cake.
Have you ever tried small batch brewing? Do you have any tricks for bottling one gallon at a time?
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David Ackley is a beer writer, brewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder and editor of the Local Beer Blog.

There are lots of culinary uses for beer: marinades, soups, sauces, baking, cocktails. Cooking with beer is just one more way to bring creativity into your homebrewing hobby. A few years ago, I discovered a recipe for some the most decadent cupcakes I’ve ever had – and they just happened to be made with beer!
For this recipe, most any dark beer will work, though I’d avoid anything with an excessive amount of hops, since the bitterness can come through in the food. For example, I wouldn’t try this with a black IPA, but a milk chocolate stout, a coffee stout, or even Guinness would work great. Another fun commercial beer option is Terrapin’s Moo-Hoo Chocolate Milk Stout.
The recipe below comes from the Food Network, but I’ve made a couple changes. In particular, I reduced the powdered sugar in the icing from 1 lb. to 3/4 lb. Don’t worry – these cupcakes are still plenty sweet!

Recipe: Chocolate Stout Cupcakes
For the cupcakes:

• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa (reserve a couple tablespoons for dusting the finished cupcakes)
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• Pinch of fine sea salt
• 12 oz. homebrew beer (milk chocolate stout is amazing!)
• 1 stick butter, melted
• 1 tbsp. vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• 3/4 cup sour cream

For the icing:

• 1 (8 oz.) package cream cheese, at room temperature
• 3/4 to 1 cup heavy cream
• 3/4 lb. powdered sugar

To make the cupcakes:

1. Preheat oven to 350˚F.
2. In a large mixing bowl, mix together the dry ingredients: cocoa, sugar, flour, baking soda, and salt.
3. In another mixing bowl, combine the beer, melted butter, and vanilla.
4. One at time, beat the eggs into the liquid ingredients, then mix in the sour cream until thoroughly combined.
5. Gradually mix the dry ingredients into the wet mixture.
6. Lightly grease 24 muffin tins. Divide the batter equally between the muffin tins, filling each 3/4 full.
7. Bake for about 25 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through. Remove from the over when the cupcakes are risen, nicely domed, and set in the middle but still soft and tender. Cool before removing the cupcakes from the pan.

To make the icing:
* The icing can be made in advance and kept covered in the refrigerator.

1. In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese on medium speed until light and fluffy.
2. Slowly beat in the heavy cream.
3. Gradually mix in the powdered sugar until incorporated and smooth.
4. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use.

To serve, top each cupcake with frosting and dust with cocoa. If you’re feeling extra naughty, serve with a glass of your homebrewed stout!
Do you ever cook with your homebrew? What do you like to make?
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David Ackley is a beer writer, brewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder and editor of the Local Beer Blog.

We recently had a question on the E. C. Kraus Homebrewing Blog about doing a double infusion mash in a mash tun cooler. Since I recently used this procedure for my black lager, I figured I’d walk you through the step-by-step of a double infusion mash.
The challenge when doing a double infusion mash in a cooler-style mash tun is that you can’t add heat directly to the mash tun. To raise the temperature of the mash, you have to add enough water of a certain temperature to raise the temperature of the mash to hit your target mash temperature. The math is a little complicated, so I prefer to use a software program to help me figure out the water additions. In this case, I’m using iBrewMaster.
The mash schedule as specified by my beer recipe calls for the following:

• 30 minutes at 95˚F (protein rest)
• 60 minutes at 153˚F (saccharification rest)
• 10 minutes at 170˚F (mash out)

The trick with using a software program is that it takes a few batches to calibrate the constant figures in the program. There are a number of factors that influence the calculations, including:

• Grain weight
• Grain temperature
• Mash tun temperature
• Mash tun volume loss

The mash tun volume loss should be a constant, but grain temperature and mash tun temperature may change with the season if you keep all of your brewing gear in a garage or basement. Ideally, you’ve already brewed a few times and you have a good idea of these numbers. I’ve filled them in to the iBrewMaster defaults under “Equipment Profiles.”

After entering these numbers, I can apply the equipment profile and mash profile to the recipe to calculate how much water I need for each step of the double infusion mash. Here’s what it gave me:

• 5 qts. of water at 129˚F to hit 95˚F
• 57 qts. of water at 212˚F to hit 153˚F
• 59 qts. of water at 212˚F to hit 170˚F
• 8 qts. of water for sparging

Now it takes a little common sense to look at these numbers. 28.8 qts. is more than enough sparge water for a five-gallon batch. In reality, it will only be 2-3 gallons, but it’s better to have too much than too little!
From here on out, brew day is pretty simple. Follow the mash schedule for the double-infusion mash, simply mixing in the water into the cooler at the appropriate time. The only exception is the sparge water. To avoid diluting the wort, I recommend mixing in the sparge water gradually. Either do a fly sparge, in which the water trickles in over the grains at the same rate that it leaves the mash tun, or a batch sparge, where the mash tun is completely drained, then you calculate how much additional wort you need, then mix in that amount of sparge water into the mash tun and drain again. Read this post about homebrew sparging techniques to learn more about batch vs. fly sparging.
The beer recipe for this black lager is fairly simple, so I won’t walk through the remaining step of the brew day: boil, chill, pitch yeast!
Check back soon to see how this black lager turns out!

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David Ackley is a beer writer, homebrewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.

A few months ago I shared beer recipe for a German black lager: schwarzbier. I’ve decided to make this my next batch.
To me, dark lagers represent the best of two worlds. With roasted malt, they offer the depth of flavor of some heavier beers while still being relatively light and smooth – qualities contributed by the lager side of the equation.
As a lager, I find this to be a more challenging style to brew than say, a double IPA. With a relatively low amount of hops, there’s no hiding potential faults behind extreme hop bitterness or flavor. Paying particular attention to yeast pitching rates and fermentation temperatures will be critical towards making this a great beer.
To gear up for my black lager brew day, I’m going to plan my water amendments and prepare a yeast starter.

Water Amendments for a Munich Schwarzbier

To calculate the water amendments for this beer recipe, I’m going to head over to the mash chemistry calculator over at Brewers Friend. First, I’ll input my local water profile.

Then I’ll play around with the “Salt Additions” section until the “Actual” numbers for each of the main brewing minerals matches relatively closely to the profile for Munich Dark Lager. It’s not about getting a perfect match so much as getting in the ballpark.

So, I’ll add 14 grams of chalk and 3 gram of Epsom salt, which gets me pretty close to the Munich water profile.
Now I can get to work on the yeast starter.

Yeast Starter for a Munich Schwarzbier
Of the two, this part is probably more important than the water amendments. Pitching enough yeast to fully ferment the lager is critical to getting a complete fermentation with a minimum of off-flavors. And since lagers require about twice as much yeast as ales, it’s extra important to build a yeast starter.
For this calculation, I’ll use the Brewer’s Friend Yeast Pitch Calculator to make sure my yeast starter has enough cells to do the job.
First, I’ll input the original gravity of the beer, the wort volume, and the number of yeast packs I’m using, and the manufacture date of the yeast. Unfortunately, I’ve been sitting on this yeast for a little while, so the “cells available” count falls well short of the target 386 billion yeast cells need for this beer. Clearly, we need a yeast starter.

Scroll down to the next section to continue. Hit the “Grab from Above” to pull in the info from the previous section. Then, using the defaults, choosing the appropriate growth model and aeration technique. I don’t have a stir plate yet, so I’ve chosen “C. White – Shaking.” This means I’ll give the starter swirl every now and then.

As you can see, the ending yeast cell count is still well short of the yeast count we need. To step up the starter again, we’ll check the box for step 2 and repeat the process.

In practice, all that’s required in stepping up a yeast starter is decanting some of the liquid from the starter and then transferring it onto an additional 2L of starter wort. After two steps, the yeast count is still a tiny bit short of the target (368 vs. 369 billion cells), but it’s close enough. On brew day, after the beer is chilled to pitching temperature, the whole starter can go right into the wort. Make sure there’s plenty of headspace in the primary fermenter – this one should get chugging right away!
Check back soon to follow along with brewing this schwarzbier! Cheers!
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David Ackley is a beer writer, homebrewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.

After several weeks of fermentation, it’s time to bottle my hard apple cider.
Just as a refresher, I took five gallons of apple juice, pasteurized the juice and pitched the yeast, and then divided it into three separate fermenters for secondary fermentation: one plain, one dry-hopped, and one with blueberry and cardamom.
Unfortunately, the blueberry and cardamom batch became infected. I took measures to stave off the infection, but I probably could have been more timely and/or aggressive with my efforts. Today, I decided to just dump the blueberry cardamom batch. I gave it a taste and while it may well have passed as drinkable, in my head I would’ve known that it wasn’t as good as it could have been. In the end, dumping a few bottles (less than a gallon) worth of cider isn’t the end of the world. I’m not going to worry about it, and instead I’ll just learn from my mistakes and move on. I think next time I would wait a little longer to add the fruit and spices, and maybe make a blueberry syrup or extract instead of using whole fruit.
Meanwhile, my other two hard apple ciders look and taste pretty good, so I’m going to go ahead and bottle. The only thing is that they are very hazy, which is weird, because the infected cider was nearly crystal clear. Who can explain that phenomenon? Next time I make a cider, I’ll do a proper cold crash to see if it will clear. The good news is, as far as I can tell, there’s no infection.
So on to bottling…
When bottling split batches like this, it’s essential to use a priming sugar calculator. This will help make sure that you have enough carbonation and also don’t over prime and end up with a bottle bomb. The bottling process takes a little longer for the split batches, simply because you have to add the priming sugar, bottle, rinse, and repeat. Still, I think I finished bottling in just about an hour.
Now here’s a timesaving bottling tip: Line up your bottles single file, then put caps in place. Then you can go down the line and quickly cap each bottle in succession. (You might do this in several rows.)
After tasting the hydrometer samples, I’m pretty excited about the plain hard apple cider: dry, but with plenty of apple flavor and some vanilla notes. The hopped apple cider is good too, but I think it will really shine once it’s bottled, carbonated, and chilled.
The one thing I’d like to figure out is how long to age the cider. I’ve heard that hard apple cider can take a year to really peak, but I’ve also heard that using ale yeast (like I did), can lead to a drinkable product a lot sooner. I guess I’ll just have to taste ‘em as I go and find out!
Do you like to make hard apple cider? What advice do you have for fermenting and bottle conditioning?
Series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
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David Ackley is a beer writer, homebrewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is founder of the Local Beer Blog.