Rochefort 10 Clone-ish is Complete

Well, the Rochefort 10 Clone-ish is finally bottled. Now, 10 weeks of aging… That means this nice, strong winter-time beer will be ready to drink on Labor Day weekend. Hrm, that doesn’t seem right… That’s okay, maybe there will be some of the next batch ready for then.

If you take a look here you can see all 49 bottles. They are filled almost exactly the same amount each, capped, etc. You may wonder why 49 bottles… Well, the first I tend to set aside because it contains the little bits of sanitizer that was pushed out of the lines and bottling kit was the beer first ran into the bottle. I tend to mark this bottle then set it aside for… Well, just to make sure that I don’t get it to anyone intending it to taste spot on. As I use commercial food grade sanitizer the beer is very safe to drink (one can drink the sanitizer straight, although it’d probably cause heartburn) and it’s probably just fine tasting, but I don’t want to risk anyone accidently drinking something unpleasant.

There’s also a shot here of the kitchen as I typically have it set up for bottling. Bucket on counter siphoning the beer down to a bottling wand. Then I sit on the floor, case of empty (and washed and sanitized) bottles in front of me, filling them one at a time and setting a cap on top. The caps are soaked in cheap vodka (Crystal Palace) four at a time in order to sanitize them but not inadvertently use up the oxygen-reactive lining which (supposedly) helps preserve beer.

So, uhm…. Yeah. The beer is bottled. That shot up above is something which I noticed when drying the bottles towards the end of the night. See, after bottling I’ll rinse the bottles in room temp water and then hand dry them, just to get any remaining sanitizer or drips or whatnot off the outside. This ensures that they look nice. Anyway, I saw my Kubrick Pill Tofu peeking distortedly through the Crystal Palace bottle, so I grabbed that image too.

Now I’m done, which means bed time soon. No work tomorrow, but I’m still really sleepy, and a good night sleep will (hopefully) do me well.