Bottled!

So, I took a final gravity reading on Monday evening after a trip back to Homebrew HQ to replace a broken hydrometer (they were very nice about it, since it broke through no fault of my own).  It was a steady 1.014, just like the previous two, so into the fridge in the garage the carboy went to cold crash for a day.

Most of the bottles I used are Sam Adams bottles, which still had the labels on them.  I read in a couple of places, and also had a friend suggest, that OxyClean will take the labels right off.  With a fresh container of OxyClean picked up at Kroger on the way home, I filled up my cooler with water and a couple of scoops OxyClean, and put the bottles in to soak.

After heading over to my brother's new house to help him move some furniture around, I checked on the bottles soaking in OxyClean, and found a whole mass of bottle labels floating around.  Had a quick dinner of leftover pot roast (just as good the second time around!) and then got the bottles rinsed and onto the bottom rack of the dishwasher to dry.  After getting tomorrow's dinner marinade made and the pork chops marinating, it was time to bottle!

I got my 5 gallons of sanitizer solution mixed in the bottling bucket and sanitized everything I'd be using, minus the bottles.  I put a little bit of sanitizer solution into a small bowl, and dumped my bottlecaps in there.  Once the bucket and equipment had time to soak, I transferred the solution to my brew kettle to use as a bottle sanitizing station.  While this was all going on, I had my 5oz of corn sugar boiling in 16oz of water.  Once the bottling bucket was empty of sanitizer, I hooked up the bottling wand thing to the spigot and poured the priming solution in.

The carboy had been waiting patiently on the kitchen table this whole time, warming back up after being in the cold for just over 24 hours.  I grabbed my fancy auto-siphon out and started racking the beer into the bottling bucket.  That took about 10 minutes or so.  Once that was done, I started bottling.  The bottling process itself took just over 30 minutes, probably.  After cleaning up the kitchen, I put my box of 40 full beer bottles ( I was expecting 50, guess my testing samples took more out than I thought) into a nice dark spot to carbonate and condition.  I'll check on them in a week and a half or so, see how they're doing.

I'm hoping to brew up my IPA this weekend, but it's a drill weekend, so we'll see!