Better Bottle Hack

After listening to many, many episodes of Can You Brew It on the brewing network, the standard volumes they use are a part of my process.

For a 60 minute boil:

• Mash and sparge to 7.2 gallons
• Boil down to 6 gallons
• Transfer 5.5 to the fermentor
• Finish with 5 gallons of clear, drinkable beer

Since none of my boil kettles have a sight glass on them, I decided to do something I'd been thinking about for a while. I measured out a half gallon of water, put the better bottle on a flat, level surface and started marking. After the first half gallon, I did full gallons up to 5.5. (It's actually a bit higher up in the Better Bottle than I thought it would've been. Regardless, after the massive blow-out I had earlier this year in a Russian Imperial Stout, I've started adding fermcap to my fermentation now as well.)

Here's the end result. It made it a whole lot easier to top a partial boil extract batch up to the correct volume at the end of the process and should make it a hell of a lot easier to transfer out exactly five gallons of finished beer.

I could've gone with the fancy vinyl stickers I've seen elsewhere, but a sharpie seems to have worked just fine this time around.