Oktoberfest

Last night we bottled our Oktoberfest beer, which was our third batch since we started brewing last fall, but our first lager. A lager is different than most beers made by home brewers, which are ales. An ale can be fermented at room temperature, whereas a lager needs colder temperatures to ferment properly, in the 34-40 degree range.
Since we have a root cellar that we keep at between 32 and 40 degrees all winter, we figured that would be a perfect place to ferment our Oktoberfest lager.

Traditionally, Oktoberfest beers are brewed in March and left to lager for a few months until they are ready for the celebrations in October. Since we don't have the ability to maintain cold enough temperatures in our root cellar much past March, we started it in February.

The bottling process consists of siphoning the wort from a carboy (fermenting vessel) into a bottling bucket, and then filling and capping each sanitized bottle. You can see Katherine in the picture capping the Oktoberfest bottles with our spiffy new orange caps.