Before moving on to the bottling of what will be the last of my half batches for now, there is a bit of housekeeping to mention. I will be tweaking the look and functioning of the site in the coming days, so you will notice things moving around a bit. Perhaps it is in part because I have the itch to do so, but it is also in preparation for bigger and better things to come in this year and beyond. I have some formatting ideas that I would like to try out and now seems like a good time to give them the green light. Be sure to let me know what you like or don’t like about the changes you see.
Now then, in place of the usual food and travel post on Monday, I bring you more brewing updates . . .
When I say that these are the last half batches for now it is only because I have to adjust my approach to brewing these small amounts and also because I have bigger batches already in the works. I will revisit the smaller (half) batches some day.
The bottling process for these two took me a lot longer than usual since there was a bit of an oversight in the use of my equipment that made it necessary to do some extra racking to get the job done. Also because all of my fermenters were tied up with other batches I did leave these two in secondary fermentation for almost twice as long as what I have done in the past. We will see if that makes a significant difference.
Final racking
A close up look.
There is not much to go over for the bottling process though I do intend on getting the whole thing on video one of these times. Aside from boiling the bottle caps for five minutes, the other main preparation was to boil 2.5 oz of corn sugar in 1 cup of water for each of the two batches. After cooling to below 80 degrees, the sugar solution is added to the bucket before racking the beer from the secondary fermenter.
Bottle caps reporting for duty.
The cranberry and ginger infused IPA was the first to go and the final gravity reading came in at 1.0206. That leaves the beer at about 3.6% ABV and establishes a new low alcohol content for my home brews (not a real surprise). It did seem to have a pretty nice aroma and flavor, making me think that it will turn out into a pretty good, light beer.
Just a little sample.
The British IPA was next to go and it clocked in at a specific gravity of about 1.0176, giving it a final ABV of roughly 3.77%. Again that was not a shock and the flavor was fine. It is definitely not an IPA, but I will likely have a(nother) good lighter beer on my hands.
In the bottle at last
The Cheif of Sanitation is always present.
The one hiccup in the bottling process was when I left my setup unattended to deal with an issue the dog was having. Thinking that I had to put pressure on the bottling wand for the beer to flow, I did not expect anything to happen. Let’s just say that there was a fair amount of beer overflowed into the box of bottles and there was some clean up to do before continuing on. In the end, I lost a few bottles worth of beer to learn a valuable lesson.
Don't leave it unattended!
Now it will sit in bottles for a few weeks before the official review.
Until then . . .
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