Iceman IPA Bottling day

We were busy on Monday night, so we had to postpone bottling our IPA until tonight. The original recipe called for the beer to be dry hopped for 7 days. Since our beer was transferred to secondary on a Monday (a holiday), bottling on a school night wasn't easy to arrange.

All bottled and almost ready to drink

We made the decision to use all long neck bottles 12 oz bottles today as we had a large amount of them. We had been going through short neck bottles like nobody's business the last few times we bottled, so it was time to clean up some of the older bottles that had been sitting around.

Almost as clean as they'd have ever been.

As always, a good wash in a hot bleach solution gets rid of most bottle labels and other dirty clinging to the sides of the bottles.

So many hops

Popping open the fermenter, we could smell the hops from a mile away. There was so much hop particulate floating around at the top. Because of this, we weren't able to get a bit of the beer.

Here we go let's get to secondary.

Ok, there might be some hop particles entering here, but they'll settle out and not enter the bottles.

In this position, siphoning takes a lot longer than normal because the height difference is less than when the bucket is on the ground. I could show you the equation behind it, but I don't want to scare anyone who hasn't taken fluid mechanics yet.

Someone is going to call me out on this

Ready to fill!

The dry hopping added floral and fruity aromas, like those found in grapefruit. This was our first time dry hopping with cascade hops, so now we know what it will smell like next time we use those. Now my house smells pleasant with those smells.

Filling...

...and capping

Filling the bottles went fine, only a little bit of beer was lost to spillage. This batch yielded only 35 bottles. With a two way split, we only got ~18 each. I'm a bit disappointed with the amount of beer we got, but I blame the dry hops for causing about 1/4 gallon worth of beer to be unsiphonable. Bottle conditioning will be done by next Tuesday, so we'll try to give you a taste test next week.

All the beer

Coming up this Saturday is brew day. We will be brewing a Vanilla Porter. What else should we try brewing?

Update: 2/13

Bottle conditioning took a little while longer than anticipated, but the pour is so good. Cheers!

Iceman at it's finest.