BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

The great advantage of brewing a very small batch of beer is that it can only be a very small disaster.

I kid.  Somewhat.  Bottling is now finished, but it was a bit of a trial.  To begin with, the beer didn't attenuate quite as far as predicted - it's actually only 5.9% alcohol, I estimate, with a final gravity of about 1.028 or 1.029 - but that's fine.  It certainly tastes good.  Unfortunately, though, between the unavoidable losses, some spills resulting from my still far-from-perfect solo bottling technique, miscalculations, and so on, I've probably got less than three liters all together actually bottled.  This means both that I'm 25% short of my target batch size, and that I probably have too much headspace in my bottles which may affect carbonation.

Still, fingers crossed.  I'd like to crack at least one open in about ten days at the next Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild meeting (my first!), so hopefully it will be ready by then.

It's all worth it in the end, though:







(The label, based on that doodle in a previous post, was made in Inkscape, which is a very cool program I wish I could run the latest version of, and attached with tape, because the glue stick I bought turned out to be no good.)

Well, I've learned a lot of lessons for next time...