Bottling is an exciting stage of homebrewing because it means that you are close to finally enjoying your beer after all the struggle you had to go through to brew it.
Before you bottle your beer you need to successfully ferment it first, but once the fermentation is done it’s time for bottling and then conditioning both at the room temperature and in a fridge. When we talk about how long you have to wait before you can bottle the beer, we need to know the fermentation time for each beer type.
You can bottle beers after 7-10 days except for lagers fermented under 55°F which takes 1-2 months, and high ABV (8%+) beers which may need 2-3 weeks in a primary fermenter. Before you can safely bottle it’s important that fermentation is fully complete in the primary, however, you can optionally put your beer in a secondary fermenter for a few more weeks for better clarity.
As you can see, beers differ in types and recipes, so it’s impossible to give you a precise time before you can bottle your beer without knowing what beer you are brewing.
Simply put, most ales and some lagers fermented at room temperature will be done within a week or two in case they are not high in alcohol (ABV). You can find the precise time it needs to ferment for in the recipe instructions and on a yeast package.
How long can beer sit before bottling? Can it be too late to bottle?
It’s difficult to bottle beer too late because beer can stay in the fermenter for a long time even after the fermentation is complete before it goes bad. If you take care of the fermenter and its environment, the beer doesn’t have to be immediately bottled as soon as the fermentation completes and can stay in for over a month.
Therefore, it’s possible to reach the level when the beer becomes bad and is no longer good for bottling, but it rarely happens to homebrewers because it would take a long time.
Can you bottle beer too early and what can happen?
It’s possible to bottle beer too early if you are not careful. Bottling too early can result in unfinished beer and bottle bombs.
Beer might end up unfinished because the yeast didn’t have enough time to eat all sugars and as a consequence, you’ll have less ABV and the beer will be sweet.
Such beer won’t properly develop in later stages during conditioning and the flavors will be weaker than a fully fermented beer.
However, the worst thing you should worry about bottling too early is the notorious bottle bombs. Bottle bombs are caused when Co2 accumulates within a bottle and creates pressure which eventually causes a cap or part of the bottle to crack.
This happens when the yeast didn’t have time to eat all sugars during primary fermentation and continues to eat it and create Co2 within a bottle which doesn’t allow the Co2 to escape. Some other ways how people get bottle bombs can also be adding too much priming sugar when bottling.
How to be sure your beer is ready for bottling?
Give it extra time
To ensure that your beer is ready for bottling you can either follow the instructions in the recipe guide and just to be sure let it a couple of extra days over the instructed fermentation time just to be sure. This is a good practice because if you didn’t exactly hit the temperature, or the yeast colonies were weaker than the yeast used in the instructions, it can take a bit longer for fermentation to complete.
Take gravity readings
The best method to know when beer is ready for bottling is by taking gravity readings. This method will help you determine the stage of fermentation and it is also the only way to know how much alcohol will be in your beer.
For this method, you’ll need a hydrometer and a hydrometer tube which are one-time investments and aren’t expensive but are absolutely mandatory for serious homebrewing. As a matter of fact, I recommend hydrometers even to absolute beginners because they will need them at one stage.
To check whether the beer is ready for bottling you’ll need to take two samples with 3 days in between and check their gravity readings. If there’s no difference in the readings it means the beer is no longer fermenting and it’s safe for bottling, but if there’s a single drop in the readings it needs more time.
As I said, most beginner recipes and especially those who brew with beer extracts will be able to bottle within 2 weeks, but sometimes things aren’t that simple. For instance, last time I brewed a 12% ABV mead which took more than 3 months to ferment.
Final take on
If you need any help with bottling, you can check my guide for bottling beer where I explained the entire process step by step and also mentioned a few useful tips.
Bottling is not a complex process, but knowing the fundamentals is absolutely crucial or at this stage, you can possibly ruin your entire homebrew.
This reminds me of the times when I accidentally miscalculated priming solution and underprimed 2 batches in a row, resulting in 40 bottles of mead and 36 bottles of ale ending up flat. This wasn’t a big deal for mead because it can also be enjoyed flat, but unfortunately, the beer was a disaster.
Hopefully, I learned from my mistakes and now I am sharing them with you, so you do not have to repeat my mistakes.