Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Winter Ale is bottled!

Believe it or not, I finally bottled the Winter Ale last weekend. You may recall that it started as a West Coast Pale Ale back in August. I then added cinnamon sticks, vanilla beans, 4 pounds of honey, and champagne yeast to it in November. Low and behold, I take a gravity reading this weekend and the bad boy is all the way down to 1.008 - gotta love that champagne yeast! I decided to hydrate half a package of Safeale S-04 yeast and add to my bottling bucket with the corn sugar.
I start bottling and I get halfway through and realize I only have 34 clean bottles instead of the 50+ I thought I had. (I was also in the middle of my first partial mash, so I was a little distracted) Thankfully I had two 1.3 gal. minikegs lying around and I filled those up too. Grand total: 32 12oz, 2 22 oz and two 1.32 gal. minikegs. By my calculation, that is 6 gallons of fresh beer, and the hydrometer sample was delicious. I can't wait until it carbonates because the cupboard is bare.

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