Bottling Bitter take two

Over all the bottling was a success! The only issue that I can think of off hand was that the gravity was still a little high at 1.010. I didn't want to wait any longer and wouldn't have the time during the week for a bottling, so today had to be the day. I just hope that it doesn't cause any bottle bomb issues, but considering that the ginger beer seems to be doing ok I don't think that it'll be an issue.

I boiled around 200ml of water and added 160g of cane sugar and poured it into one of the 23L carboys I picked up a little while back. I then pumped the finished wort into the carboy, mixing the wort with the priming solution. After I finished filling the bottles I cleaned out the pail and carboy, giving the bottles a chance to start to carb and push out all the oxygen that would have been on top of the wort. Next I capped them and put them up on a dresser in me basement. I figure that I'll leave them up there for about a week and then put them on the cooler floor. And then into the fridge some time before drinking them. I plan to crack some open on the 3rd to taste. Also, see below for pictures! And it came out to 45 500ml bottles.

EDIT: And that's everything, I'm all caught up now. Everything from this point onwards will be fresh and new. 

08/06/2010 Munton's Premium Bitter take two

That's right take two, didn't make any mistakes this time (third times the charm eh?) and used the plastic pail. Which is funny because I found it easier to clean and use then the glass carboy. Maybe if I can find a source I'll switch over to the clear plastic better bottles.

Even though I didn't over water this time the gravity was still a little short at 1.038. I pitched in another 100g of sugar to try and up it the last two points. Another thing was since I didn't want to spend money again on spring water I ended up just filling the empty containers from the previous attempt with tap water and leaving them over night for the chlorine to evaporate.

I went to bottle it last night and was in for some disappointment. The gravity 1.012 when it needed to be 1.008... Since I'm still new to this I didn't want to take the chance with bottle bombs and so left it for tomorrow. I'm not going to have time during the week, so for better or worse it's going into the bottles tomorrow.

08/03/10 Munton's Premium Bitter

Ok, so lacking the proper equipment and a grain source for all grain brewing I decided to try another extract kit. This time I went with Munton's Premium Bitter and enlisted the aid of a friend to help things go smoothly.

Which didn't really help... it seems that I had forgotten that the 1.5L of the kit threw off the total amount of water and we ended up using too much again :(. At the time I worked through the water math a few times to make sure that I didn't screw it up and I forgot about the bloody kit again... gah. This time I was also using the glass carboy that I got with the kit. I wanted to watch the beer brewing instead of trying to peer through a translucent plastic pail.

As a fix for the extra water we decided to add some more sugar to the mix. The gravity came out to about 1.034ish and we added another 150g of sugar to try and raise it. The kit mentioned 1.040 in the instructions, but we only got up to 1.036 with the addition of the sugar :P

I figured that it was going to blow over when the yeast started, so we placed it into the plastic pale to catch the overflow. The pail ended up being a good idea for catching the overflow, when I came down the next morning there was tons of foamy yeast sitting on top of the carboy and some wort in the bottom of the pail. The bad part of using the pail was taking the carboy out to clean off the overflow. It slipped out of my hands as I was setting it down... glass and concrete don't really like each other so it's a good idea to prevent the two from meeting in any sort of impact...

Several hours later with some cussing, some lacerations, some pumping, some moping and some more cussing I had manged to clean up the mess of 24L of glass shard infested wort. During the process I had somehow manged to misplace the sediment trap for the pump as well as hit my head on just about every low lying beam, air duct or light bulb in the basement as well as get soaked by the insolent pump (with beer and water) whenever I pumped too hard...

Suffice to say I shall no longer be using glass for primary fermentation for anything over a gallon.