Activity # 3 - Bottling Beer

March 11, 2010

Shenandoah Brewing Company

Alexandria, VA
Cost: $32 per person, included dinner on premises
http://www.shenandoahbrewing.com/ From their website: You will make an appointment for bottling at the time you brew. When you come to bottle, your beer will be carbonated and ready to drink. You will put lables on your bottles, wash bottles in your bottle washer and fill the bottles with beer in our automatic fillers. You can sample your own beer while you are bottling. Bottling will take you about 2 hours.

Alright, let’s re-write this for them. First, a sentence needs to be added about NOT changing the scheduled beer bottling date. (We had a few things come up including a broken limb.) This place is closed MOST days of the week - making it quite difficult to cancel in advance. Second, we did not get to label our beers on this night because of the condensation. We did get to see how they cute they turned out - misspellings and all! Third, we feel that the term “automatic filler” is perhaps a bit misleading!!! And 2 hours? Ha!

Since this is was second trip to Shenandoah Brewing Company (See Activity #2 – Making, Mixing & Brewing Beer), we strolled in like we knew everything, instantly recognizing the lovely beer smell and familiar cafeteria-like lighting! This time we were assigned to Joe. As soon as he opened his mouth we realized he was a bit irritated that we had to reschedule our bottling date… (twice, but who is counting?) However, once he chatted with us a few minutes and noticed Summer’s cast, he kindly waived our no-show fee and became our friend. I guess people have been rescheduling and over-using the broken limb excuse.

After some brief instruction, we were hard at work – quickly realizing that this bottling process was not going to be as “fun” as brewing the beer. We had 5 cases of beer to sanitize… luckily, there was a user-friendly machine for this and Summer was able to help us push the button. After our bottles were clean, we listened to more instruction from Joe on how to fill and cap our bottles. He described what would happen if we failed to WIPE the bottom (butt) of our beer bottles “it will smell like ___” or how if we didn’t correctly line up the neck of the beer in the filling machine we would be “fighting a losing battle.”

The next few hours were work! We had to individually fill each bottle of beer, and then cap (not easy, clearly a “capping elbow” hazard) and then wipe the butt of the beer. We sampled our beer (thanks Kristin!) while rotating stations (since there were four of us) and soon it seemed completely appropriate for Ashli to turn to Shana and ask loudly “Did you wipe?” after Shana handed her a beer. What? Just hours before we were so lady-like, weren’t we? Here the four of us stood with sticky hands in the back of a terribly lit beer factory asking each other about wiping butts… This must be what this club is all about!

Joe explained that our beer needed to stay in the bottle for 2 weeks before we drank it so that the carbonation would settle and the full flavor would come through. Our expert opinion was that our beer tasted delicious, but was missing that “nutty” taste… oh, right, it needs to “NUT UP!”
After a tired recap - “I liked this activity” - over microwaved chili & sandwiches, we headed home with our 28-29 bottles of beer each to enjoy – and label - at our convenience.
We really did enjoy this activity - and most of us have been enjoying the beer too! One of us will need to wait until mid-August...