Saison: BOTTLED!

We bottled our Saison last night and here are my observations:

1. There were still plenty of hops floating around in the liquid. Hmmm...

2. When we started pouring it into the bottling bucket...hoooooo boy did it smell like alcohol. Tequila specifically. Made me a little nervous. However...

3. Our hydrometer reading only shows that the alcohol percentage is around 5% so why does it smell like Tequila???

4. When you have a lot of hops and a lot of malts in your beer this is what the bottom of the carboy looks like:

Ohhhhhhhh BARF.

In conclusion...this will DEFINITELY be a beer we will be drinking out of a glass, not the bottle...

Bottling the Peace Coffee Porter

On Saturday March 12th we bottled our Peace Coffee Porter from Northern Brewer. It's been maxin' and relaxin' in the fermenter for a week with the coffee grounds directly in the liquid. After dumping them all in and thinking about it for a few days, I wondered if maybe that was the wrong thing to do.

Were we supposed to cold brew the coffee and THEN pour in the liquid coffee? If so, how much liquid were we supposed to brew the coffee in? Bwaaaaaah?

Of course, it was too late to ask such questions. But it was not too late to figure out how to prevent the coffee grounds from getting in the bottled beer. Luckily, one of us is an engineer...




An electrical engineer. OK, that didn't come in handy here. But still, Tom came up with the idea of siphoning the beer through a reusable (and sanitized) coffee filter. It worked like a charm!










Those coffee grounds would have ended up in our beer.















How else would you label your Peace Coffee Porter bottles?