Little Bottling, little kegging

While I have not been brewing much in the recent past, I have been aging a few brews. The first was my melomel that I brewed earlier this year. It's been aging for three months in secondary and ended off with a FG or 1.026. It's pretty sweet, so I topped it off with a few pints of water so that the sugar would get cut a little.

I had a few tastes and I have to say, it's pretty good. I am carbonating and hope that they carbonation gives a little bite to offset the sweetness.

The second project was the bottling of the Christmas Ale. I decided on a name and made up labels using Bottle Your Brand. They were fast and the price was decent. The thing that I liked was that they have a template for your label so you don't have to use one of the generic ones that they have. Once I get a picture of one of my bottles, I'll be sure to post it up.

Finally, I am trying out Word Press as my blogging utility. I am playing around with it now to see what I think of it, but if your interested in taking a look, please feel free to check it out at cnybrew.wordpress.com. Let me know what you think.

Cheers

Bottling Followup

After all of my problems with bottling, I decided to take the advice from some of the folks who so kindly submitted advice. I also spent some time reading back up on brewing basics. Sometimes in the heat of brewing bigger and better, we forget to cover the basics. Well this week was a good review.

What went wrong? Well first off, I'm not real sure. There were several problems; over carbonation, aeration, metallic flavors and made my beer an intense experience.

What did I change? Well just about everything. I now siphon the brew from my secondary into a bottling bucket and add my priming sugar. From here, I sanitize my spoon and give it a light stir to get things mixed up properly. After this, I bottle using the bottling wand that came with my original kit. I rinse my bottles after I sanitize them and before I add brew to ensure that there are no residual films or smells from the sanitizing solution.

Once I am done bottling, I remove the wand and add a hose to the bottling bucket that runs into my keg. This is in hopes of preventing any potential oxidation that could occur in this stage of the brewing. When the bottling bucket is empty, I close the keg and cap my bottles. Done.

As far as my over carbonation, I have moved from the 3/4cup of priming sugar I used to 1/2 cup (unless Beer Smith tells me to use more or less). I also have been using Beer Smith to determine how much to add in times of having an odd amount. For example, I only had two gallons of Alt and needed to bottle condition that. So I added the amount that Beer Smith told me to and it's prefect!

I have to say, it looks as though I may have worked my way through my bottling woes...for now anyway.

Cheers!

Bottling and me; a hate, hate relationship

Since I have started doing "stuff" with my beer that I brew, I have begun to notice the need to revisit one of the more basic aspect of brewing; bottling. For me it's a rather contentious relationship. When I got into brewing, it was to have beer on tap. Nothing more.

With my recent misadventures in actually drinking the beer that I was bottling, I have noticed a significant difference in the product I get out of the tap and what I get out of the bottle. At first, I realized I had problems with oxidation. That was easy enough to solve, but now I appear to have problems with carbonation and with a metallic off taste.

First off, the way that I bottle is I take the brew from out of the secondary and put it into the keg. I add my 3/4 cup dex at this point. Once it's all filled up, I put some CO2 pressure on the keg to make sure it's sealed and shake enough to mix the dex and the brew. After this I use a party tap with a filling wand to fill the bottles. Easy enough.

There are a few holes I was able to locate in my process that may have caused the problems I am having;

1) Too much dex- For my latest brew, I dialed it down to 1/2 cup
2) Not rinsing - I use one-step and supposedly you are supposed to be able to do everything in "one step", but this might not be true as I have been doing that and I have flavor problems
3) Party tap - There might be something between the party tap and the wand that is causing an off flavor. I think the way to test this would be to resort to the bottling bucket

I am open to suggestions on anything that might be causing me problems here. I am going to slowly address each of these issues and see where I stand. Hopefully it's nothing serious because the beer I have been kegging has been good. Technically the bottled beer should be no different.

While so far it appears that I am the "loser" in this battle, the guys at MNB were kind enough to share their credit card information on their video so that I can get some of the parts that I need to make my brewery complete; it's mighty big of those guys to do that.

Bottled Mother's ESB

Today was my day to bottle the ESB and take the final gravity. Now I say bottle because I picked up some growlers from my Brother-in-law at his eBay store:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220065864894

I wound up getting 18 of them because I wanted to start having some brew to take with me places. These worked out well with this batch because I didn't wind up with the 5 gallons I was shooting for. This was the result of all the hops I used in the process and the lack of any filtration out of my brew kettle. I lost a whole gallon's worth of ESB from all of the hops I had to dump out. Oh well, live and learn.

Anyway, I took my FG and it was 1.010 making this a 6.5% ABV wonder. I drank the gravity sample and I was a little turned off because there was a strong alcohol burn, but otherwise it was quite good.

I am hoping that a little bit of time will cure the issues with the burn. I will be sure to write on the growlers, but so far they are great and it's not easy to find the amber ones, so that's a bonus.

Cheers!