Bottling the all grain beer

We brewed our first batch of all grain a few weeks ago. There were a few slightly suboptimal things in the process. We ended up with a bit more cloud from the grain than ideal as we had some issues draining the wort off the grain (plus the grain crusher was a bit temperamental and didn't give a very even crack) and we had some hiccups transferring it from our brew pan in to the fermenting vessel. We bottled it yesterday, it is too soon to say how it is going to come out as beer tastes very flat and dry before the extra sugar makes the fizz in the bottle but we had some slight worries about 'off tastes'. We did also think it looked a bit cloudier that this stage than normal. We will report back in a week or two when they have finished bottle conditioning and we can try one.

Ready to transfer from fermenter to bottling vessel

 Having learnt from our first all grain brew we have ordered a new brew kettle with a false bottom and a tap which should hopefully smooth the process out a bit by allowing us to extract the liquid (wort) from the grain more easily and with less grain dust for a clearer beer. Unfortunately they sent the wrong size so it has to be returned and exchanged for the correct one before we can try it. Grrrrrrr.
We also bought a new capper which has both a 26mm and 29mm head so we can now put caps on to champagne (and fizzy wine) bottles. V exciting and a shame we didn't know this existed when we were living our champagne lifestyle in London. Boo hoo for all the bottles we threw out!!

The new capper with champagne bottle

Vin Sauvage (fizzy wine) bottles with beer in