UPDATE: Red Ale (HB#2) now in bottles

Bottling day set up

I realized very late last night that today was bottling day for the Red Ale (HB#2). In a hurry, I filled my plastic tub with water and Oxyclean, and I soaked as many bottles as I could find, which happened to be just enough. Today was a long day that started with de-labeling and scrubbing the bottles and ended with transferring and bottling. The process was more or less the same as the Foreign Extra Stout (HB#1), so I will not go into too much detail on the bottling process.

Cracked bottle

Great amber red color

We did have a few bottles break on us when being capped. The broken bottles, on top of only having 4.5 gallons of beer (instead of the usual 5 gallons), produced only thirty-six 12 oz bottles and three 22 oz bottles. It is a little under the typical forty-eight 12 oz-ers, but like I said, the volume was a half gallon less than usual (because some was lost on brew day when transferring from the kettle to the carboy), so it was expected.

The gravity reading was spot on the target at 1.013, so everything seemed to have gone as planned. In two weeks, this beer should be ready to drink....but I will probably crack one open in a week just to see how it is coming along.