Bottling

It’s been about two weeks and my latest brew is ready to journey from the carboy to the bottles. This particular brew is supposed to be an IPA but…seeing as I’m not much of an IPA person, I might have sweetened it out with a little too much honey. This is my first beer I wasn’t sure about.

One issue I ran into was during the initial fermentation. The first burst of activity blew what hops I couldn’t filter out up into the throat of the carboy and into my blow off tube. This created a small issue when I changed out my blow off tube for the airlock. There was a crust that formed in the carboy throat and it was blocking everything. I ended up having to clear the block before I could put the airlock on.

Very carefully I used a sterilized spoon to clear it, while trying very hard to keep it from falling into the beer. I did pretty well, thankfully. After that it was all a waiting game.

After two weeks it was time to bottle. This is the first time I had a cloudy beer, I mean really cloudy. There was a lot of sediment at the bottom of the carboy and the beer itself was not as clear as I had hoped. Not a big deal but, like I said, I wasn’t too sure about this brew.

Bottling went well with my usual setup. I used honey as my charging sugar for bottling. This time I used smaller grolsch bottles than I normally do. I did this with the intention to give some of this brew away and not loose my cobalt blue 16oz bottles.

There were no issues during bottling besides the fact that my auto siphon broke last time I bottled and I need to get a replacement. It still works but the curved neck broke off and the interior tube gets easily stuck in the outer tube…oh well, that’s a good excuse to go to the homebrew supply store.

I ended up with six 12oz and two 16oz bottles of beer. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one turning out.

Brewing again

Made my first IPA last weekend. Tried some new stuff out and learned a few things.


I decided it was time to brew again. I wanted to try out brewing a modified Everyday IPA from Brooklyn Brew Shop.
The mash in and out went well but I changed a few things out when it came to sparging. I used a new, shallower top strainer lined with cheese cloth. This seemed to prevent the overflow problem I was having with my strainer. I still would like to build a new mash/sparge setup but I haven’t had the time lately.

During the boil I added my pelleted hops as directed by the recipe in 15 minute increments. The one change-up I made was I added honey at the start of the boil on a whim. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen with that.

I still need to make a chiller too; for the time being I still use an ice bath to cool my hot wort.

I found my funnel and screen became clogged with hops when I poured the wort into the carboy. I had to stop and clear it twice to get the wort flowing again.

The other thing I noticed is that when I changed out my initial blow-off tube I had a hard crust of hops in the tube and around the neck of the carboy. The crust was blocking everything up. Usually I would leave it alone until I went to bottle but in this case it was so bad, about the thickness of a fist, that I had to clear it.

It’s a very cloudy, thick looking monstrosity at this point.

I’ll be bottling this Sunday…here’s hoping it turns out.