Bottling the 2014 X-Mas Ale

I bottled today SheppyBrew's 2014 X-Mas Ale today.

I hate bottling.

My original plan was to let the X-Mas Ale sit in secondary longer, but when I made that plan, I was forgetting that I need the secondary for adding spices to my pumpkin ale. So, I decided to go ahead and bottle today.

Have I mentioned that I hate bottling? Hate is probably too strong a word. It is mostly that it is just more time-consuming than kegging. It has been a long time that I've bottled a whole batch of beer, and I had almost forgotten how much more time consuming it is. I'm not too sure what the last batch of beer was that I bottled. It might be last year's X-Mas Ale.

Bottling Hoptoberfest

So, I've mentioned that I bribed the people I work with in an attempt to get them to donate to the 2nd Wind Fund. It worked, so I had to brew up more Stouticus American Stout (darn!). I also brewed up a beer that I called Hoptoberfest , which is a Vienna Lager with much more late addition Hallertauer and Crystal hops than you would traditionally get in a Vienna Lager. You could almost call it a love-child between my 15 Year Anniversary Amber Ale and my Rocktoberfest Lager. It was designed with lots of Munich and Vienna malts, fermented with lager yeast at (mostly) lager temperatures, but hopped like the 15 year. Sounds absolutely yummy ... doesn't it? The sample I had certainly tasted like it would be good.

Back to the mash tun

Saturday, I took the wife and kids on a field trip to The Brew Hut to get ingredients for the 2011 version of SheppyBrew's X-Mas Ale. I brewed it up on Sunday.

The kids really like the Dry Dock

Of course, my big fermenter was full of Stouticus American Stout, so I got up early and bottled up Stouticus. This time, I mixed sugar and the beer in a corny keg and used my Beer Gun to bottle it up. It seems to have gone smoother this way, but that may have just been the fun of a new process. One decent advantage of using the keg is that it is easier to get every bit of beer out of the keg than it is out of a bottling bucket.

Beer Gun

I've done 7 blog posts in GABF month, and only one of them has been about beer or brewing. Shameful. Anyone coming from the Complete List of Beer Blogs will wonder why the hell this is listed as a beer blog. I guess Root Beer and Pretzels mentions BYO magazine. Does that count?

But don't worry, beer lovers. Today's entry does have to do with beer.

I used my Blichman Beer Gun for the first time yesterday. The beer gun is SheppyBrew's newest toy. In case you do not know, the beer gun is designed to transfer kegged beer to bottles. I probably should have tried a less-expensive home-made method, but I decided to treat myself to this extravagance. Since I have never bottled from a keg before, I cannot comment on advantages over other methods. But the beer gun is pretty slick.