I like to take a "flat" taste of all the beers I'm making before bottling- just to see how they did in secondary conditioning. Especially with a sensitive beer like this one (no protection from hops!), I felt it'd be good to know if it tasted like cough syrup or bandaids before we continued. Fortunately, it wasn't half bad- a fruity, sweet quality mixed with the oddest menthol flavor. Sounds like the wintergreen did its job!
Spilled some herbs in there. Oops... the spout should filter them thoughSiphoning the beer out of the gallon jug proved difficult- I had to actually suck the siphon like a straw to get it started. This is highly UNrecommended, as even the smallest bacteria or possibly even foreign yeast strain from a different beer you might be drinking at the time can contaminate the batch. I just did what I had to at the time- the same logic of which I applied to pouring the beer from the jug into the bottling bucket once the siphon failed entirely (again, unrecommended- extra oxygen can jack up the end flavor. Oh well...)
I pared down the bottling sugar for a 5 gallon batch (3/4 cup) to a scant two tablespoons. After boiling this in some water and adding to the beer, I bottled in the sanitized bottles, including a 750ml barleywine bottle. Sadly, my bottle capper wouldn't fit onto it. So, out come some more beer bottles, and finally, the finished product: 
I marked each bottle with the glyph for Capricorn, just to complete the theme. Now, in 3 weeks these should be carbonated and ready for consumption- just in time for the Winter Solstice, and the yearly ingress (movement) of the sun from Sagittarius to Capricorn.Look at the following post for a bit about how beer, Saturn and Capricorn are related!
1 comment:
Very cool. I really think your beer brewing skill is a very neat hobby, and I appreciate you sharing some more of the ins and outs of it with us. Makes me want to start doing it myself, and I don't even care for beer that much :)
Post a Comment