Bottling Time

Well that time has come, at least I think it has anyway. I have been checking the hydrometer reading for three days now and it hasn't changed. It is steady at 1.022, the directions say it should finish between 1.013 and 1.018 but it hasn't moved so I am going to go ahead and bottle it.

First step sanitize everything, bottles, bottling wand, 6 gallon carboy, everything...

Transfer the beer from the 5 gallon carboy to the 6 gallon carboy we are going to use for bottling.

Isnt that yummy, lovely waste from fermentation.



I got everything sanitized and then I just decide to drink it from the carboy, who needs to bottle it anyway.




Yeah like that would happen, here are some lovely action shots and the final bottles, the batch net 46 bottles of beer, a little less than the recipe said but I left an inch or so in each bottle so I didn't put waste into the bottles. Cant wait for a couple of weeks until I get to try it.







So the starting hydrometer reading was 1.082 and the final was 1.022 giving the beer a 6% APV, a little lower than the recipe says but hopefully it still rocks.

Secondary Fermentation

Opened the primary fermentor today and took the hydrometer reading, it was at 1030 so we moved the beer to a 5 gallon carboy to finish the fermentation. When I first opened the bucket it didn't look all that great but man did it smell good.


Isnt this what it looks like after you drink too much?






Isn't that pretty?

The fermentation started right up again, it had slowed down quite a bit in the primary fermentor but after moving it bubbles started up again every minute or so.

Homebrewing

Well finally went out and purchased a homebrewing kit, been thinking about it for months. The wife and I went to the local fermentation supply company, they walked us through the different kits, we decided to go with the deluxe model. Not sure how that will work out for us but hopefully everything goes well.

We purchased an ingredient kit for making Belgian Tripel beer. Got home and decided to get started, we read all the instructions and it says to use a stainless steal pot that is 20 quarts or larger. Great the supplier sold us 16 quart one, what do we do? Oh well, they are closed all we can do is try. We put 3 gallons of water in the pot, and it was close to the top, so we decided to remove some of the water. I would say we had 2.75 gallons of water in there.

Next step was to steep the grains for 15 minutes, that was really cool. The kitchen started to smell like grapenuts cereal. Then we brought the concoction up to a boil and added the malted barley, hops and other ingredients. Boiled it for 45 minutes then added the finishing hops and boiled for 15 more minutes. Now the important part rapidly cool the mixture, well that didnt go so well, we got it down to the 100 degree range fairly quickly but ran out of ice so it took a while to get to sub 75 degrees so we could add the yeast and start the fermentation. Hopefully everything turns out alright but if not, oh well scratch it up to a learning experience.