...and into the bottle!!

I let the brew sit in the secondary for two weeks. It didn't separate completely. There seemed to be three layers. Most of the heavier lighter colored material sank to the bottom. The top was nearly clear and the darkest color. The middle had a yellowish color. I hadn't seen that before.



The top clear liquid had a wonderful hoppy flavor, while the middle had a lingering aftertaste that I cannot place.

Carbonating sugars:
1/4 barley malt syrup (lot this stuff)
2 cups water

Pour (that's a figure of speech) the syrup into the water and let it liquify. Pour the mixture into the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket. Transfer beer from secondary back to the primary to allow good mixing.

Then elevate the 5 gallon bucket and siphon the beer into bottles of any size.

This made 44 12oz beers, and should be ready by Yule...keeping fingers crossed.

Five and a Half

I just realized that with this batch of beer, I have been brewing for five and a half years. That's quite a bit of time.

So, for the next five years, I am going to continue with my Hug Hop Ale, but also work on brewing some stranger varieties of mashes. Maybe use Nettles as a bitter, do some more experiments with dandelions. Put some of those nasty blackberry briars to work in a carboy. Add some extravagant color to a beer with some Sumac. I'll bet that the Chicory would cook up nicely into some pungent brew. Echinacea, Sweet Woodruff, Sheep Sorrel, get ready to be blended into a fermenting mixture and mash!

Time to get hectic on the brewing front!!

In the Secondary Chamber

Transferred the beer into the secondary. It was murkier than I had expected it to be, being that the only ingredients are hops and malt. It tasted really good, not too hoppy, but definitely had the presence of the Cascades showing up. The color is the lightest that I've brewed, which is the direction that I would like to go anyways. The airlock began bubbling almost immediately.

One week later

For the past week, this brew has been bubbling to beat the band. Initially, it was sitting it our bedroom to go through the first stage of fermentation, but was just to talkative, and I had to move it to the kitchen.

One week later, it has slowed it's bubbling. It's gotten much colder, so that may have helped it slow down. I will be transferring it to the secondary in about a week. We'll see what happens next.