Once you’ve made your ambrosia, you’ll need to sit tight and wait for it to finish fermenting. Throughout the fermentation, you’ll need to check in on it regularly, to ensure that it doesn’t develop any unwanted moulds, and also to monitor the yeast’s consumption of sugar. This is particularly important if you want to make a pet nat ambrosia, although if you do miss the optimal window, it’s still possible to make a sparkling ambrosia, you’ll just need to go through an extra step. I’ll outline all of this below, including how you know when it’s the right time to bottle your ambrosia, the exact steps you need to take, and some of the things to take into consideration in the lead up to, and during, bottling.

Before You Bottle: What You Need to Consider

Choosing the Right Bottle

Bottling ambrosia is more than just transferring liquid; it's about encapsulating the spirit of your creation. Selecting the right bottles is crucial. Dark glass bottles, often tinted green or brown, shield the ambrosia from light exposure, which can cause oxidation and degradation of flavours. This is a key consideration if you’re planning on ageing your ambrosia for a long time; it’s less important if you’re intending to drink it quickly and/or are planning to age somewhere that it won’t be exposed to light. Clear bottles look really nice and can be visually appealing as people can then see the colour of the drink. Your choice should depend on what you’ve made and what your aim is.

Choose bottles that seal tightly and are equipped with quality closures like corks or caps. You can use screwcaps but be aware that if you’re reusing screwcap bottles, they don’t seal properly, so won’t provide a good environment for ageing. The closure should form an airtight seal to prevent unwanted exposure to oxygen, unless you want a little bit of micro oxygenation to take place in which case a cork is more suitable, though a regular cork and bottle aren’t suitable for sparkling ambrosia. You need to get sparkling bottles, corks, and cages as they are designed to withstand the pressure produced by the CO2 that creates the sparkle. I tend to use caps with my sparkling bottles, because they’re easy to use. Cappers are also relatively cheap, easy to use, and you can use caps for both sparkling and still ambrosias.

Preparation: Cleanliness is Key

Before bottling, ensure that all your equipment is thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. Any contaminants can jeopardize the months of work you've invested. Use boiling water, to clean your bottles, closures, and any utensils you'll use. If you want to go a step further, you could also use a saline solution or Destainex, as outlined in the previous post. Rinsing thoroughly is essential to remove any cleaning residue. Keep in mind that even the smallest residue can introduce off-flavours or spoilage organisms.

When to Bottle

When you decide to bottle will depend on a number of factors, but key among them is the amount of sugar remaining in the ambrosia. If you want to make a still ambrosia, it’s crucial that you ensure all of the sugar has been consumed by the yeast prior to bottling. If you want to make a sparkling ambrosia, you will need to bottle the ambrosia when there is still some sugar remaining OR you can prime the ambrosia with a bit of extra honey or cane sugar. You can use a hydrometer to measure how much sugar there is remaining in the ambrosia (if you have a refractometer, this unfortunately won’t work for ambrosia). Most hydrometers are calibrated to work in liquid at 20C (it will say what the calibration temperature is on the side of your hydrometer or in the instructions that come with it), so if your ambrosia liquid is cooler or hotter than that, you’ll need to either do something to adjust the temperature or you can use an online calculator to work out what your reading actually means. The hotter your liquid, the less buoyant the hydrometer so the lower your reading will be and vice versa.

Use the beer scale to measure the remaining sugar in ambrosia. Though this scale is intended to measure specific gravity in beer, in ambrosia it’s a pretty close representation of the grams of residual sugar in the ferment. The number which aligns to the meniscus is the reading. At 1.000, there is no residual sugar

To measure the sugar concentration, simply fill the tube that the hydrometer comes with to around 3/4 full, place the hydrometer in it and give it a little spin to get rid of any air bubbles and get a more accurate reading. When it stops spinning and comes to rest, the point at which it meets the meniscus of the liquid will tell you how much sugar is remaining. Use the beer reading to determine this (see the picture). Whatever number you see on the scale is how much sugar there is remaining. If it comes to rest at 20 (or 1.020 specific gravity), it means there’s 20g per litre of sugar remaining etc.

This is a little different to how you would interpret the reading for beer and wine, but it’s based on the specific sugar composition of honey, which contains a number of different sugars in slightly different proportions, depending on the honey. The type of sugar determines how it affects the buoyancy of the hydrometer. For example, in a solution with more glucose, the reading will be higher compared to a solution with the same amount of fructose, where it will be slightly lower

Even though the sugar composition varies honey to honey, the glucose and fructose contents tend to always fall within a certain range, which means that the readings are reasonably consistent honey to honey. I have discovered through calculating the sugar concentration before starting a ferment, then checking my calculation against a hydrometer reading, that the specific gravity reading is a fairly direct representation of the amount of sugar in the dissolved solution. If you knew what the glucose and fructose concentrations were in your honey, you could be more accurate, but for the purposes of even commercial production, the difference is so slight that it’s not really necessary.

So, what’s the magic number for making a sparkling ambrosia? Through a number of trials, I’ve found 10g/L to produce the best results for plain ambrosias (just honey and water), whereas for ambrosias with fruit or grain infusions, where there’s likely to be more suspended solids in the liquid, then 8g/L is a safer option as the solids interact with CO2 and produce more vigorous bubbles. It may also be related to a slightly different composition of sugars, but again, I would suggest that unless you need to be super accurate, there’s no need to check the sugar composition.

The reason why it’s important to measure this and be accurate is that you don’t want to create a bottle of ambrosia that has so much trapped CO2 that the pressure becomes explosive. On the other land, if you don’t have enough residual sugar when bottling, the bubbles will only be very slight and less persistent once the bottle is opened.

If you miss the crucial window for bottling like a pet nat, all is not lost. You can prime your ambrosia by adding some more honey in. To calculate the amount you need, you need to first decide how much you’re going to add per litre (8g or 10g), multiply that by your total volume (in litres) and then add the water percentage. For example, if I was bottling 15L of an ambrosia with 0g residual sugar but wanted to prime back up to 10g with a honey with 16% water, I would calculate it as follows;

15L x 10g/sugar = 150g/sugar

150g/sugar + 16%H2O = 174g/honey required

You can do the same thing with an ambrosia that hasn’t quite finished fermented but has gone past the window that you want to bottle within. If I caught the ambrosia when it had just 5g/sugar but I wanted to bottle with 10g/sugar, I would just work out what my sugar deficit is and then based on that, how much honey I would need to bring it up to the desired sugar level. I would work this out as follows;

10g/sugar (desired) - 5g/sugar (actual) = 5g/sugar (deficit)

15L x 5g/sugar = 75g/sugar

75g/sugar + 16%H2O = 87g/honey required

One other thing to note about priming - make sure you dissolve the honey in a little bit of ambrosia before adding it, so it doesn’t sink to the bottom of the ferment and isn’t dispersed fully throughout the liquid. To do this, you can literally rack or scoop some of the ferment out into a jug or bucket, add your honey, stir to dissolve, then pour the lot back into the ferment and give it a good stir or agitate to ensure it diffuses through the entire ferment. Needless to say, you should do this a day or two before racking OR after racking, when there’s no lees or other sediment to stir up. If you do it afterwards, just be sure to base your calculations on the racked volume of ambrosia, not on the original volume.

Racking and Clarification

Before bottling, you’ll need to rack your ambrosia. Racking involves transferring the liquid from one vessel to another, leaving sediment and debris behind. This step helps clarify the liquid, ensuring that the final product is visually appealing and free from unwanted particles. It will also reduce variation between bottles, particularly for sparkling ambrosias (though I will go through the process of disgorging in the next post). Gentle racking also minimizes the risk of oxidation and contamination.

Gravity racking wine. It’s generally slower than with a pump, but gentler and all you need is a hose, though a homemade racking spear is also helpful.

The simplest way to rack is to place your ambrosia at height above the vessel that you’re racking into (something you’ll need to think about before putting the ferment on if it’s too heavy to lift by hand and you don’t have a forklift) and use gravity to rack. Just be sure to move it carefully, avoiding agitating any sediment at the bottom of the fermenter. You can simply insert a tube or food grade hose into the liquid, suck on the end that’s out of the liquid still while below the level of the submerged end and, once you see the liquid coming through, insert the end into the vessel that it’s being racked into. You’ll need to keep an eye on the top part of the hose to make sure it stays submerged, as well as to ensure that it doesn’t end up getting submerged in sediment, which it will then pull out and defeat the purpose of racking.

A way to make this easier is to use a racking spear. You can buy racking spears but they’re fairly expensive, so if you’re just starting out or making ambrosias at home, a DIY might be a more practical option. Making a racking spear with say, a piece of dowel or a length of stainless steel which you fix the end of the hose to with cable ties, is fairly simple. Stainless steel is better since it’s easier to sanitise, but dowel can be used in a pinch - just make sure to clean it well between uses. Once secured, you can move the end of the hose up and down along the length according to where you want to rack to in your solution. Depending on the size and shape of your fermenting vessel, plus how much sediment you have, you might want to position the hose so the end is 15cm from the bottom. You then place the “racking spear” into the solution, with the bottom touching the base of the fermenter. It will hold the hose in place so it doesn’t suck any sediment up, but you should still keep an eye on the liquid coming out into your fermenter, just in case you’ve gauged the sediment level incorrectly. The moment you notice sediment coming through, stop racking and/or adjust the hose height as needed.

You can also use a pump - small magnetic pumps are relatively inexpensive and negate the need to have the ambrosia elevated for racking. You’ll just need to prime the pump first and be aware that if an ambrosia ferment is quite active when you’re racking it, the dissolved CO2 can make it run a bit slower or get stuck.

You may also want to consider straining the ambrosia through a cheesecloth or chux cloth if there’s a lot of solids floating in it that haven’t settled to the bottom. Honey has a little more protein than grape juice, so sometimes forms protein agglomerations, particularly if a lot of wax or solids has gone into the ferment initially, so straining while racking can be a good idea. Just line a sieve or colander with whatever fabric you’re straining with and then hold it over the vessel you’re racking into, while holding the end of the hose so that the liquid passes through it.

Bottling!

Filling Your Bottles

Now, the exciting bit. There’s a couple of ways to approach actually getting the ambrosia into bottle. If you can get your hands on one, you could use a bottle filler, which fits into a tap that comes with some plastic fermenters (or you could install one in a plastic fermenter yourself). Just place the fermenter onto a table of bench, insert the bottle filler into the tap, turn the tap on, insert the bottle filler into an empty bottle and press up with the bottle. As you press up, a valve is opened at the bottom of the bottle filler and liquid should start coming through and filling your bottle. Once it’s pretty much full, pull the bottle down to close the valve. The space taken up by the bottle filler should result in there being a bit of head space in the bottle. Bottles are actually designed to have this, and it’s particularly important that you leave this if you’re making a sparkling ambrosia as it leaves space to accommodate for expansion caused by carbonation. If you don’t leave it, you may end up with too much pressure in your bottle. The rule of thumb is around 1 to 1.5 inches of headspace.

If you don’t have a bottle filler, you can use a jug and funnel (this is how I bottled ambrosias for a year, even the ones I was selling commercially). Just keep an eye on how much you’re putting in and try not to overfill. If you’re not sure exactly how much you should be putting in, check what the recommended volume is for the bottles you’re using and then weigh out that amount of water and fill it with that as a reference.

The cork is placed into the slot in the corker, while the bottle is fitted into place below. Once everything is set, pull the lever down (out of picture) to insert the cork.

Corking or Capping

If you're using corks, ensure they are properly sterilized before insertion. If the corks you’re using are synthetic, they should be fairly sterile, so long as they haven’t been out of the bag or been handled a lot. If you’re using natural or agglomerate corks, they should have been steamed beforehand. In general, they’re good for about six months after this, so long as they’re kept somewhere airtight out of direct sunlight. The steaming sterilises them. Using them past six months increases the chances of them being dried out and/or contaminated. A corker will gently press the cork into the neck of the bottle.

For caps, use a capping tool or capper to securely affix them. Cappers have a magnet to hold the cap in place, so place the cap on the underside of the capper before putting your bottle underneath it. Make sure the bottle is fairly well lined up with the centre of the capper (there should be rings that act as a guide for this) and then press down with the lever of the capper. You should feel it crimp in the sides of the cap, and come to a point where you can’t press down with it anymore. You’ll know that it’s securely in place if you push at it a bit once you remove it from the capper. If it doesn’t move around on the bottle, it’s secure. If it does, put it back into the capper and re-crimp.

Labelling

Don't forget to label your bottles. Include important details like the date of bottling, ingredients used, and any special notes. This not only helps you track your creations but also adds a professional touch.

Storage and Ageing

With your ambrosia now securely bottled, the anticipation of flavour development and evolution begins. Depending on the style, ambrosia can develop nuances and complexities over time. Keep track of how your creations transform and develop, and indulge in the joy of tasting the results of your craftsmanship. Store your bottled ambrosia in a cool, dark place. Temperature fluctuations can impact the aging process, so maintaining a consistent environment is crucial, though you ought not to store it in the fridge as it will be too cold for the ambrosia to develop and evolve. You’ll want to let it sit for at least a few weeks after bottling, even if it’s a still ambrosia, because it will likely go through what we call bottle shock and won’t taste as good as what it will if it has some time to settle.

If you’ve made a sparkling ambrosia, you’ll probably need to let it rest for at least a month so that the last bit of fermentation can take place. Keep it at least at room temperature as the yeast will be more active. If you open a bottle and it hasn’t carbonated properly, the rest of the bottles from that batch need to be left for longer. If you’re in a hurry, consider putting it somewhere a bit warmer to speed things along, though be careful not to let it get above 35C as the yeast may not survive at higher temperatures. Once it’s fully sparkling, move to somewhere cooler to continue the rest of its ageing process more slowly. Though it will continue to develop and evolve, it’s now shelf stable (i.e. it doesn’t need to be kept in the fridge), though you may want to consider disgorging it to remove any remaining sediment or yeast lees - more on that in the next post.

Happy bottling!

- Lou xo

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Part 2: Bottling the Nectar of the Gods