My Plan for Second Batch

Hello again! Tomorrow will be two weeks since I brewed this Irish Red Ale. I took a refractometer reading today and converted it and I'm just a smidge below the predicted FG of 1.010 - the measured was 1.009. I'll measure again Sunday morning and if it is the same FG I'll bottle. I took a little taste and all seems fine. So looks like I'm on track for a success on my second batch - much thanks to you folks, as always!

 

Bottling done! Had some problems though.

I put all my bottle out in rows of 5 and as I finish filling a row I loosely place a cap on those 5 and move on to the next row (I keep a sanitized sheet of aluminum foil loosely on top of those not filled yet. When all have been filled and have a cap resting on them I then use the capper tool to crimp them in place. Good news is I got 20 full bottles, which is what I was aiming for. Bad news is that for some reason some of the bottles seemed to not work well with the capper - they were all Founders with the new raised letters on them (from Backwoods Bastard this year). No matter how hard I tried I could not get those to cap.... It is hard to explain but half way through the motion of capping the capper would just kind of "hiccup" and then the wings of the capper would go the rest of the way but without crimping the cap. None of the other bottles (that were not from Backwoods Bastard) had any problem. So I had no way to cap five of the 20 bottles so I ended up with only 15 bottles capped. Could have been worse. I know - RDWHAHB!!

 

These were mid-fill bottles. Once the dust settled... and I had a homebrew and calmed down... I experimented with some empty bottles. EVERY TIME I tried capping one of the raised-letter Founders bottles it didn't work and every time I tried capping some other type bottle it worked. I just now did 6 in a row of other type bottles with no problem... then tried one of the Founders and it did not work. Seems odd but that is what my data shows!

What I should have done is quickly cleaned & sterilized these other bottles I had in my bottle-return bin and poured the beer into them and capped... but at the moment I was not thinking clearly as I was a bit frustrated. And I hadn't yet completely figured out that it was a particular TYPE of bottle that was causing the problem.

 

You can BET I'll be doing that EVERY time from now on!!! One time is an honest mistake but two times is just plain stupid!!

 

So it I'm ready to try one tonight. As I was putting a couple in the fridge I noticed that I had been able to cap at least one of the Founders Backwoods Bastard bottles... but look at the difference between that cap and one of the others in the photo below!! Founders BWB is on the right!!!!

Needless to say, I'm *not* going to open that one first, so as to not spoil the "first bottle" moment for this batch.

 

Well I'm now two for two! My first batch (Honey Porter from a kit) turned out pretty good and my second batch (Irish Red Ale that I put together from an AHA recipe) also turned out pretty good. Is it a *great* beer? No. Is a good beer? Yes,, and that is all I can ask for at this point of having done two extract batches.

Oh.... I opened one of the funky-capped bottles and it had less carb than one that had a good cap. The carb was not so low that it was undrinkable but it was not really that good.

I am in no hurry in my brewing adventures: My goal is to learn a few new things on each batch. This batch's learning was (i) I bumped up to 2 gallons with a new brew pot and carboy so I wanted to learn about the volumes at each step and my final yield, (ii) to assemble the ingredients from a published recipe and use my new scale to measure it all out, (iii) switch to using corn sugar for carbonation rather than the sugar drops I used from the kit. That may not seem like a lot of change but as I said I'm in no hurry.

Next batch will probably be an ESB and the goals will be to either go to rehydrated dry yeast or maybe try liquid yeast (so far I've only pitched dry yeast directly into the carboy).

Thanks to all of you who have helped me with a special thanks to @Mothergoose03 and @VikeMan!!!!

 

Hello again... I just went to a meeting of my local homebrewing club and took a couple bottles of my brew. Consensus was that it was a good, clean brew! I wasn't expecting any raves, as this was an rather unexciting Irish Red Ale but was glad to hear that all thought it was a solid brew with no off flavors. OK... ready to go for my third batch!