Movin' Things Around

In anticipation of Dark Ephipany's debut tomorrow night, I transferred one of my eight quarts from the downstairs refrigeration unit (the mini-fridge in the Man Cave) to the primary refrigeration unit (the Sears Kenmore fridge in my kitchen).  I also grabbed the final bottle of Comfy Chair and plan to stare at it for the rest of the week before succumbing to temptation by cracking it open on Thursday or Friday.  I sure am gonna miss that when it's gone, but I will need the bottle within a week when Farty Monk is ready for carbonation.

Both of the Mr Beer kits came with eight quart-sized plastic bottles.  Well, technically the bottles are liters and are made of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), which is perfect for this application since they're recycled/able, are chemically inert, and can be cleaned chemically or with ordinary water (provided you don't let anything dry out and cake).  The only downside is, well, they're plastic.  They're nice platic, and they're hugely practical, but they're just not as aesthetically appealing as a glass bottle would be.  Nevertheless, I have 16 of these, which means I can set back two entire batches in the bottles I have been provided.

During one of my trips to Butler Winery's downtown Bloomington tasting room -slash- beermaking supply store, I splurged and dropped fifty smackers for a case of twelve liter-sized dark amber Grolsch-style bottles.  You know the kind, they have a hard ceramic lid that is held on by a wire mechanism that allows the bottle to be repeatedly resealed after opening. I only needed eight of them for a batch of beer, leaving me with four extras.  So natrually, during Butler's recent sale, I bought another case.  This brings me to a total bottling capacity of 10 gallons - 16 PET bottles and 24 Grolsh glass bottles - which is both liberating and limiting, since it keeps me from going crazy by making more beer than I can bottle and store.

At present, seven of the PET bottles stand empty.  The entire eight-bottle run of Angry Weasel and seven of the PETs that held Comfy Chair have been used and cleaned.  Of those 15, eight were pressed into service this weekend to allow the Czech Pilsner to begin carbonating.  Since Farty Monk will be ready for bottling this coming Sunday, I am going to have to empty out the final bottle of Comfy Chair to ensure nothing gets wasted.  The 24 Grolsch bottles are already accounted for: eight are holding Dark Epiphany, eight more are holding Shaved Amadeus, and the rest are reserved for when I bottle the Christmas Stout on or about June 1st.

An interesting side note: The Pilsner (BB-V) was a very different beer than anything I had brewed/bottled to-date.  Unlike other beer mixes which combine an HME with either powdered Booster or UME, this mix required two HMEs.  When put into the fermenter everything looked great, although the mix inlcudes a large number of hop "flakes" that float in the beer for quite a while before precipitating to the bottom.  Well, when I moved the keg from the fermentation locker to prep it for bottling, I jostled several of those flakes, resulting in the final two bottles getting some in them.  I ended up with a few in #7 and a LOT in #8.  As I always do, I made a small mark on the lid of the final bottle from each batch so I would know which one was most likely to be "unusual", but I am expecting that BB-V #8 will be quite funky when I uncork it.