Stopping and Restarting Bottling

Just a random question:
After Primary Fermentation, my beer is ready to bottle or keg.
Once I open the fermenter, must I rack everything and bottle it immediately- or (let’s say there was an emergency interruption) could I hypothetically bottle about half, re-seal everything and continue bottling the rest a day or two later?
Or would this just expose my fermented, yet un-bottled beer to infection and ruin whatever I hadn’t immediately bottled? :frowning:
Any thoughts?

I’m sure if everything was kept sanitary, you could return to bottling later. I wouldn’t do out of laziness.

If it’s a true emergency, are you really going to take the time to clean up and sanitize?

If I had an emergency come up, I would deal with it. I can always brew more beer.

Lol, is this a hypothetical or are you asking us to tell you everything will be ok.
Either way, I think everything will probably be ok. Yes, risk of contamination (and if you wait too long possibly oxidization) are up but more than likely I’d bet it would be ok. Now, would I make this common practice? Nope.

As long as racking to the bottling bucket and the mixture of sugar is complete.
You wouldn’t want to rack half into a bucket with the full amount of priming sugar.

Except you have limited time before the bottling sugar would ferment right out and you would be under carbed.

Thanks for the input guys :cheers: