Bottling the IPA and future plans

Now that work has calmed down a little bit, I can finally tell you about bottling the IPA. You might remember that this is the beer Nick and I dropped the yeast vial into and completely messed up the hop schedule on. I realized early in the week that I was going to need to bottle before I loaned my corker to Joel of Smoke ‘N’ Bubbles so one morning we loaded 50 odd bottles into the dishwasher to sanitize while we were at work and came home and got it done.

That’s really all there was to it, Elena was on corking/capping duties again and I was star-sanning the bottlest and filling them. One major change to the operation this time around was that I cut the piping between my bottling bucket and bottling wand down to about 2 inches. This is well illustrated here. What this accomplishes is keeping the pin within the wand in an upright position which prevents the valve from free-flowing in the event that it gets stuck sideways while you’re waving it about. This worked phenomenally well and I’ll never go back to the other way.

It’s been about 2.5 weeks since we bottled so I pulled a six pack out of the basement this weekend for a little get together. Since Elena is a food blogger Thanksgiving comes early so she can get the recipes up and we had some friends over to help us eat the 12lbs of fried turkey. After a few hours in the fridge I cracked open the first one to make sure it was carbonated enough to be worth serving, and boy was it ever. Hands down the best thing I’ve brewed to date, and one of the more well-balanced IPAs I’ve had. It’s darker, richer, and hoppier than the 60min we were trying to copy, but not as malty as the 90minute.

So what’s up next? The carboy is sitting empty at the moment, but never fear because I’ve got two kits on their way from Northern Brewer. The first is the Dark Cherry Stout which I’ll be brewing this weekend. The other is a kit for a great cause, and I’d encourage anyone who homebrews to pick it up. I’m going to be starting with Emma’s Ale as a base for my holiday brown ale. I haven’t totally decided what I’m going to do to it to “holiday-ify” it, but I think it will probably get some spices thrown into the boil and maybe some into the carboy just to be thorough. Much more research to do before that one.

As a part of that research I picked up some Troegs Mad Elf the other day so you can look for a review of that going up this weekend. I’m also hoping to catch up with my homebrew evaluations and get some formal stuff up for everything to date. Hopefully there will be a lot of beer and stuff next week. Til then.