After about 3 months of not brewing anything, I finally ran out and decided to make another brown ale.
We started it on the 5th and bottled it Wednesday, so it should be ready just in time for Thanksgiving. I have a ton of unused bottles sitting around, so I will likely brew something else in a couple weeks.
Check out The Smith Family to see what else we’ve been doing.
Shortly after brewing my sparkling ale, I read through the recipe for the lager I planned on making next, and suddenly remembered a major difference between lagers and ales:
Lagers take about 3 months to condition while ales only take a week or two.
This time requirement is the main reason everything I have made so far has been an ale, along with the fact that it would require another 3 or 4 cases of bottles.
We bottled the sparkling ale Sunday and I went ahead and brewed the lager last night. This way I have something to drink while I wait.
The ale, or sparkling beer, as I decided to call it, will be ready around the 27th. The lager should be ready for bottling this weekend, so I will probably buy bottles from my local homebrew store tomorrow.
In case you are keeping track, the sparkling beer was BEER dad brew #14 and red lager is #15.
I brewed homebrew #13 a couple weeks ago, and it just got to the point where it is ready to drink. This time we made another coffee beer using 1/2lb of the Sumatra Mandheling I have been roasting and selling on Twitter as @WichitaCoffee.
The corn sugar and caps I ordered ended up shipping late, so we were forced to wait an extra day before bottling our American Ale. While an extra day may not seem like much, the effect it has on homebrew can be disastrous depending on your recipe.
Our ale seems to be unaffected, but it is always good to bottle your beer at the precise time it’s ready. We ended up with 72 bottles this round, which will be ready for tasting in about 10 days.
Many visitors to BEER dad ask me “how do you know when your beer is ready to bottle?” and some even ask how exactly you bottle it, so here are a few tips on when and how to bottle beer.
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I noticed yesterday our porter was ready for bottling, so we spent the evening sanitizing, priming, filling, and capping the bottles. It’s a lot of work, but worth it because we ended up with just under 70 bottles for only $30.
My porter now gets to condition for about a week before I raid it. You could drink some now, but it would be too sugary to enjoy. It will end up almost exactly 5% abv and slightly darker than the picture a few posts below.
We bottled the amber bock last night and are now patiently awaiting it’s arrival in our fridge. In the process I was forced to finish my bitter so I would have enough bottles.
I will be beta tasting the bock later this week and will be researching how to make a good wine because my and BEER mom’s 2nd anniversary is just around the corner.
My amber bock will be about 6% alcohol when it’s ready.
