Today: I bottle!

I just finished cleaning 2-1/2 cases of bottles for my 11.B ale.  Trish bought me a new bottle brush which I’m in dire need of – and it won’t fit down the bottle necks.  I had to use the old one which is beginning to look like Lex Luthor; each bottle dislodged another stand of extruded plastic from the little darlin’.   And just the other day when I was buying caps at Chris & Fran’s, I was racking my brain: What is it that I really need to replace?  File that one under: “D’oh!”

Thanks again to Doug for gifting me with a couple cases of bottles – and for de-labeling them as well.  What a pain in the ass that is.  I’ve been sharing my beer with so many people over the years that I was almost out of bottles except for the flip tops, which I really don’t want to give away unless I know that I’ll be getting them back.  (Probably should start using those tho’, specifically for tastings.  They can be resealed straight away with little loss of carbonation throughout the campaign.)

I’ll start racking to the bottling bucket after while; want to chill a bit before I finish the task.  More later….

And here it is, Later:

I wound up with 58 bottles of ale, and had about 4 oz. left over to put into a plastic soda bottle to test pressure once the carbonation is finished.  (Squeeze it right there, maybe it will… what was the line from the Firesign Theatre skit?  Dunno.)  Anyhoo. final gravity was 1.006 and the ABV is 4.68%, just a little high for the upper limit of the style (4.52%).  I swilled the sample that I took for checking the finished gravity and it is a little drier than style, but that might change after it is carbonated.  We will see in a couple weeks.