51 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

My biggest question lately has been, "So, how MANY bottle of beer will this batch make?" I must admit that Brandon and I used some interesting math. Our dilemma was not with the malt extract, the hops, the water...but with the giant bucket. After boiling our ingredients and cooling the wort, we were challenged with filling the bucket to 5 gallons. The unlabeled, unmeasurable, giant bucket!

When we were trying to figure out the problem, my memory banked streamed with years and years of formulas and solutions. Difficult to pinpoint which one to use, so I brought out the most trustworthy resource we owned...a ruler. Now, I know this sounds archaic, obsolete, and all too simple.

I figured we have this giant unmeasurable bucket that needs to be divided into parts. The bucket is 6 gallons and so we could figure it had 6 equal parts. For our purposes, we merely needed 5 of those parts. I measure the length of the bucket and divided that total by 6. Then, I marked the bucket at 5 parts.

We filled our bucket with pride! Hoping that we yield 51 bottles of beautifully saturated booze, instead of 99 watery ones. Cross your fingers!