choco_frosh | Realm: Beer - Subrealm: minor home-brewing disahsters

There are two things that I am never going to do again. Trying to bottle with improper equipment, and trying to bottle alone.

You see, as some of you know I made a batch of orange wheat beer a couple of weeks ago, and planned to bottle it last weekend, perhaps while

straussmonster was visiting Peter. Unfortunately, the theme for last weekend was starting big projects and then belatedly realizing that you were missing key pieces of equipment. Thus making pancakes involved a last-minute R&G's run; and it was only after I'd sterilized the bottles on Saturday that I realized I didn't have either siphoning tubing OR the bottle capper.

I called brewing buddy S. S was sick, but did have a siphoning hose. It wasn't the one we'd previously used for bottling--it was a good deal wider--but I figured it would do. He did not have the bottle capper, which was eventually tracked down as having been lent to Adam, who'd in turn lent it to the Yale Sustainable Food Project. He very kindly got it back yesterday, and I settled down to try to bottle on my own for the first time.

After spilling iodine all over the place while re-sterilizing the tubing, I was feeling a bit stressed, but not majorly demoralized. I filled up the tube, stuck it in the fermenter, started siphoning...and very quickly discovered several things.
1) The beer came out very quickly (due to the unusual width of the tube)
2) Once started, it was very difficult to stop the flow (ditto).
3) Under these circumstances, it is very difficult to get it to fill bottles neatly.
3a) Instead, it starts to fill the tub that you (sensibly) placed under the bottles, the kitchen floor, your trousers, etc. NOT neatly.
4) If you DID stop the flow, the hose usually got an air leak (again, due to its width) and the beer drained out, forcing you to start over from the beginning.
5) Under these circumstances, one's concern for sterility evaporates like weak iodine.

...I ended up sucking beer through the hose to get it started, and simply pouring from the hose into whatever bottles were still upright. These are big no-nos. God knows if any of this beer will avoid skunking.
Also due to these setbacks, I only got 15 bottles of beer filled, instead of the 20 I was expecting. The remainder was scattered through various containers, including the oh-so-sterile dishpan. Bottling it seemed...unwise. I had some excess coolant to get rid of, fast.

I called friends P, S, and A. All are generally interested in drinking beer; none was at home. (Why are friends never around when you really need them?).

straussmonster would probably have been interested and at home; but it would have taken her some time to get here, and by that point I hoped to be in bed. Finally I called life-saving neighbor Brian, who came over and drank a pint of my product (which he rated tasty), after which we had a long conversation about Buddhism and Christianity.

[It's interesting to note, as an aside, that the emphasis on contemplation, which of course was one of the things the reformers most objected to in catholicism, is the thing that he sees as most problematic by its absence in modern Christianity. Huh.]
< / b.c.t. >

Despite his aid, there is still some (not very sterile) beer in jars in the fridge. I am hoping that

magdalenrose will drink some when she visits today. And those of you who want some of the tasty orangenweissbier (marked with an os-rune> should let me know. The recipe says that it should be drunk fairly young: a pity, given that it's more of a summery beer, but probably a very good idea in this case...

And yes, I woke up this morning and put my glasses on, and only then realized I needed to clean the beer off them.