SN Celebration Ale Clone Fermentation progress and Bottling

All seemed well after the brewday for my Sierra Nevada Celebration IPA clone, until 3 days into fermentation. I took a peak in the closet and noticed that there was a boatload of yeast caked into my airlock! Acting quickly, I remedied the situation, installing a blowoff tube into a jar.

The batch was saved... for now.

After letting the pot ferment for ~2 weeks, it was time to siphon it over to secondary. The final gravity was 1.010, giving this brew 6.3% ABV. The original target for the beer I'm imitating is 6.8%, so I'm just a bit off.

Time to siphon this and dry hop it.

My efforts to siphon away all the wort after using Irish Moss must have been mediocre, seeing all the trub and yeast stacked on the bottom of my fermenter. I guess the moss and the high flocculation of the yeast really cleared up this brew.

Nearly 1/4 gallon of trub!

Popping open the lid, I began to see how violent the yeast was to my brew. The underside was completely caked with yeast.

A few of those bubbles look suspiciously like an infection

What a mess!

Much more clear after primary than many of my other brews

Dry hopping only needed to be 5 days long. So I waited two days before popping the top and throwing in my hop pellets. My blind side-by-side taste testing will definitely show me the difference between using pellets and fresh hops.

Don't look Ken!

After 5 days it was time to bottle. I did my best to prevent any hop particles from entering the bottling bucket, but that's a near impossible task.

It's a swamp!

A sample I pulled during siphoning tasted good, near close to how the actual beer tastes. Carbonation should fix any inadequacies.

Yay beer!

As I expected with the loss of liquid due to trub and hop paticles, yield came out to 35 bottles. There is something about all the brews I dry hop that cause me to only get 30 or so bottles out of my batches. I'll need to look into fixing this. Until this is carbonated, cheers!

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