No posts for 10 days! That’s not so good. Well time to end all that and talk about bottling the Australian Pale Ale #2.
This beer really should have been bottled last weekend. But, was away in Tassie having a nice long weekend. Now I’m back the beer needed to go in bottles. Given the last attempt at bulk priming I thought I would give it another crack on a smaller scale. It worked well.
Australian Pale Ale 2 ready for bottling and dissolved sugar ready for bulk priming.
There was only four litres of the beer so I could rack it all in one go. Plus I dissolved the sugar in some water first. How about that for planning? Dissolved sugar into pot, beer racked over the top, nice. With the beer in the pot it was just a matter of syphoning into the bottles. All up it took longer than if I just used carbonation drops. That said I’m more likely to be happy with the carbonation, if it’s even across all the bottles.
I’ve talked about how I want beers for festivals where normal beer bottles aren’t allowed. So, for this batch I’ve filled a 450 ml plastic bottle to see how the beer turns out compared to glass bottles. Will let you know what the verdict is.
The beer came in at 1.014 for the final gravity. I’m pretty happy with that as the last couple brews haven’t been that low. Beer should end up at about 4.4% alcohol after bottle conditioning, that’s pretty much what I was going for. Double win.
Having sampled the beer, it’s clear it needs time to settle. Lots of big bitterness. There’s plenty of sweet peach aroma and the flavour comes out as well. There’s way too much bitterness at the end, which I really hope drops away significantly. Looking forward to trying this in two, or maybe three. weeks.
-Mikey
We make home brew 