Bottling Batch 2

Auto Siphon Self Sabotage

It’s odd that batch 2 would go into bottles before it’s predecessor, but you can’t argue with gravity. Even now batch one appears ready for bottling, but it wasn’t a couple days ago. It’s a bit like a horse race. The horse might not do two laps the way you want it to, but it’s got to cross the line in order for the second lap to count.

Over all I’m thankful if a batch dose cross the line, as nothing quite hurts like DUMPING OUT.

Anyway, as I have been progressively short of decent 1 litre plastic bottles since my old work place closed down, I decided just to be an ogre and use mostly 2 liter plastic bottles. My experience is that if you drink half of one of those bottles, and then leave the rest over night, it won’t be FLAT the next day. Flatter, but not so much that the remainder is unpleasant. That’s about 4 pints all together. 2 pints a day... Easy!

My new Auto Siphon worked like a charm. Unfortunately towards the end of the wrack I got a little greedy and decided to plunge a second time. The result was to blast a wrack load of air into the priming bucket. OOPS.

Other than letting the towel I used to cover the priming bucket dip into the beer once, nothing else went wrong... I’m still mad about that, because I mentally prepared myself NOT to let the towel dip into the beer. It was a fairly clean towel though.

The interesting thing about this bottling had nothing really to do with the beer. It was the priming sugar. I’ve often primed with about 2 cups of liquid corn sugar. It works well, and gives a good deal of carbonization. I use plastic bottles anyway so I have nothing to worry about. I wanted to get a LOT of primer though as I expected to be bottling batch 1 within days. At the grocery store I found some no-name 1 liter bottle of corn sugar. It turned out to be dark in color rather than clear but in this case that doesn't concern me.

Really, it wasn’t even the sugar it’s self that amused me. It was the BOTTLE it came in.

Check out THIS article for details on the bottle with the ribbed shape that made me feel gay with laughter. THEN, check out this related COMIC.