All Bottled Up

Well, back by popular demand (actually one person, thanks Brian for the encouragement), a post on Home Brewing! Sorry I've been absent for such a long time, there hasn't been anything to comment on since my first batch took such a long time in the secondary fermenter to finish.

I finally bottled the first batch on Thursday, got 49 beers out of it. My final gravity was 13, which is good enough. Now it's bottled and the conditioning begins. It will take approximately 2-4 weeks to condition it, so while it won't be ready for Thanksgiving, it should be ready by the first of December.

I also brewed a new batch on Friday. My second batch is a copy of Fat Tire, which is a Belgian Ale for those of you who haven't heard of it before. I took great caution to correct all of my first time mistakes, and everything was looking great until 4 hours into the brew, after I had cooled my wort, pitched the yeast and sealed the lid on the primary fermenter; I was putting the airlock onto the top of the lid when the rubber grommit, which seals around the stem of the airlock, pushed off of the lid and fell down into the beer. Oh, the horror!!!

So I had to fish it out, which I'm almost certain contaminated this batch, but rather than give up, we'll just wait it out and see if everything ends well or not. If not, then your Christmas stockings may not be stuffed with a 6-pack like I had planned. I'm researching right now to see if I could reboil it and pitch new yeast (which I'd have to buy and it wouldn't arrive til Wednesday), but then I'd know for sure that I don't have any contamination. We'll see what I hear back from my Homebrewing Brothers on the world wide web.

So this is just a quick update, I still have a couple good posts that I need to write, so stay tuned and post your comments.