Black IPA is bottled baby!

That's right kids. The Black IPA is bottled. Two more weeks and I get to pop them into the fridge and enjoy. We were 2 beers short of two full cases. Pretty damn good. Mom and Dad stopped by and Dad helped me with capping the bottles. My daughter, Sabina, even pitched in to dry the bottle caps so we could apply the labels.  This is the second batch that we applied the labels to the bottle cap. Less cleaning to remove the label from the bottle. I might try and make up better labels for the next batch. The bottle cap labels are fairly simple once I remembered how I printed them last time. After cleaning up, we sat back and enjoyed a glass of beer Dad picked up. Widmer Brothers Barrel Aged Brrrbon. Outstanding beer. It has the mouthfeel and body of a beer with great vanilla and caramel notes and boubon flavor. I think he is on a mission to find some more. Thanks for stopping by ad feel free to poke around.

Two cases of sanitized bottles, ready to go.

The tedious task of bottling. Good Lord, I need a haircut.

5 gallons of yummy

Black IPA Label



Our reward for all of our hard work.
Widmer Brothers Brrrbon



Bottling Day soon approaches.

One thing I dislike about homebrewing is bottling. It's a pain in the ass. You have to buy or collect enough for each batch. Then you have to aoak them to get the labels off. And now you have to clean them and run the bottle brush into each one. Then one bottling day you have to sanitize them. I'm lucky because I have a sanitize setting on my dishwasher. Throw in a scoop of Oxiclean Free and let it go. I really need to start investing in kegging equipment. Today I cleaned over 3.5 cases of bottles. That's about 90 bottles. Ugh. Now I have dishpan hands. Crap! That's all for now. I'll update this Sunday when I bottle the Black IPA.

Soaking the bottles in Oxiclean Free and hot water

My bottling tree. Letting the bottles dry before we put them away. 

New Brewing Equipment

So this is my second attempt to post this info. I some how deleted the first one this morning. Not enough coffee I guess.

Easter Sunday, I bought a Backyard Classic 30 quart turkey fryer from a local Walmart. My Dad had mentioned it before and I finally got over there to grab it. I have been thinking about buying a propane burner set-up anyway, so this is a great find. This will decrease my time stuck on the stove top and also make my brewing setup more portable. The 7.5 gallon pot is also a bonus.

The only drawback of the purchase was the 15 minute timer on the burner. Any home brewer out there knows that a 15 minute timer will not work when most beers are a 60 minute boil minimum. So off to the Internet I went to search the Brewing forums for a fix. I was able to find that this is an easy fix and a few minutes later I was able to remove the timer completely and the burner works perfectly.

I decided a few days later to run the burner thru a test run. After marking the 7.5 gallon pot in one gallon increments, I put 3 gallons of cold tap water into it and checked the temp which was 50°. I hooked up the propane tank and lit the burner. 18.4 minutes later I had a full rolling boil. This will definitely work for me.

Now I can't wait for my next brew. I'm thinking about a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA clone. Stay tuned.