Fourth Avenue Brew

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been super busy.

I don't have much to say except that our second batch of beer was bottled last night. Pictures coming...

We tried a couple more bottles of batch 1 yesterday and have the following to report:

- The beer is now sufficiently carbonated. Perhaps too carbonated...
- The alcohol content is pretty high.
- The beer seems almost watery although the beer toward the bottom of the bottle seems to possess a little more body.
- As for taste, it seems to lack any sort of strong flavor good or bad.
- If we were served this at a bar we'd be unimpressed but not upset.

We started our second brew on Saturday, March 14th. More info and photos to come...

The bottles are now back in the fridge. We'll probably try one of them in a week or so.

Three weeks at seventy degrees seems to be the rule of thumb for how long you should wait before you put your newly bottled beer in the fridge. Unfortunately, we had put ours in after a mere 10 days and it's looking more and more likely that that's the reason the beer seems a bit undercarbonated.

No big deal though, the beers were taken out of the fridge and jostled a bit to hopefully reawaken the yeast that had been beaten into submission by the cold of the fridge. We're going to leave the bottles out for about a week to a week and a half and hopefully that will solve the problem.

Today we tried our first taste of our first brew and the results are pretty promising. It doesn't taste like feet or soap so that in itself was a victory.

As you can see, the color looks decent but a little foggy. It tasted okay, not great, and was a little bitter at the end. It also seemed a bit undercarbonated. I'm wondering if this is because we moved the beer to the fridge too soon after bottling? We put them in the fridge about 10 days after they were bottled and I'm wondering if that wasn't enough time for the yeast to do their thing before they were exposed to the cold... I'm going to have to do some more research on this problem. For now, we're going to give it another week before we pop open another bottle.

Bottom Line: It tastes way better than Miller Lite.

It's been seventeen days since we bottled our beer. One more week to go...

It's been a week since we bottled our first batch of beer and so far there have been no explosions. We were pretty cautious about making sure the fermentation process was done before we bottled but I still half expect to find the living room covered in beer every time I walk in the front door.

Bottling day went very smoothly thanks to a couple friends who helped out. With four people, the process was quick and easy. One person would take the bottle out of the dishwasher, dry it, then hand it off to get filled. After filling it, the second person would hand it off to the third person who would cap the bottles. I was at the end of the assembly line taking the newly capped bottles, labeling the caps with the bottling date and putting them away in their boxes.

The hardest part of the process was probably siphoning from the primary fermenter to the bucket we were going to use for bottling. This is to separate the beer from much of the sediment that builds up in the bottom of the primary fermenter before we stir in the sugars that reactivate the yeast. Since I had to put my hand in the beer to start the siphon, I must have washed my hands ten to fifteen times just to make sure I didn't get anything nasty in there.

Speaking of nasty, if you should ever brew your own beer, don't try tasting the sediment at the bottom of your primary...

Anyway, by the end of this week, the beer will be ready for refrigeration. Once in the fridge, the beer should be ready to drink in about two weeks. We're thinking we'll probably be welcoming March with a sip of the new brew.

For more photos from bottling day, you can look at the Flickr set I created.

There they are, 27 bottles full of our first Belgian Pale Ale. A full report on the day's events will come soon...

These bottles are currently being run through the dishwashing machine (without soup) in preparation for bottling tomorrow. Because they're brand new, just sanitizing them like this is probably going to be sufficient. Subsequent bottlings will require us to clean out all the sediment that's going to be in them as a result of the fermenting process.

Whoever gets home first tomorrow is going to run the dishwasher one more time and then we should be ready to bottle.