Bottling Day: Schemer's Stout
Schemer's Stout, my first homebrew, is finally ready for bottling!
The night before we made DIY bottle dryers out of old IKEA shelves. Well that was the plan anyway, unfortunately we had the hardest IKEA shelves ever made and it was like drilling through titanium. Plan B saw us drilling into a big box from amazon. Much more agreeable material.
Ended up sanitizing 32 bottles and a 2 liter growler. Our make shift bottle dryers worked out great...even the cardboard one.
Started my filling with the bottles bearing my name. The mess was not cool but the smell of all that beer more then made up for it. I was worried about not having a bottling bucket, but setting my carboy up on a chair and using the siphon and bottling stick worked out perfectly fine.
We started to run low on bottles but not on beer near the end of the process. Luckily I had a 2 liter growler from a local brewery laying around. This will be a fun one to open up and make a night of drinking.
My friend Eriks was the capper for this little session. With me filling and him capping the whole 22 liter batch only took about an hour. Now the bottles are conditioning in a dark cupboard for two weeks. It is so hard to not crack one open and try it, its like knowing where your Christmas presents are and not peeking. I think we will crack a bottle on Friday after only a weeks conditioning. Check back for an update on that.
