So, for Father’s day I decided it was about time to bottle my pale ale and my mead. 15 gallons of bottling- no problem, right?
Bottles drying in dishwasher
So, I began with the mead. 5 gallons sitting in the carboy since December and ready to bottle.
Ruby Hooker Mead in carboy
I transferred the mead to my bottling bucket and took the final gravity. 1.012. Given that the original gravity was 1.124, the alcohol content on this bad boy is 14.7%. FOURTEEN POINT SEVEN PERCENT!!!! Holy cow, I’m going to have to be careful with this one!
Added 3/4 cup corn sugar and bottled it up. The taste was a lot less sweeter than I thought it would be. I got a lot of tartness from the raspberries and a hint of dryness. Seems like my yeast might have done it’s job a bit too well. Still should be good, though. Here’s what it looks like in the bottle:
Ruby Hooker in the bottle
Now, doing the Liberty Pale ale was interesting. I had some helpers to bottle it with me.
Greggory and Josiah bottling
It took a long time to bottle this one, as I had two fermenters full of beer and each one had to be transferred to my bottling bucket separately and everything sanitized in between transfers. The whole day started at around 2:30pm and ended at around 9pm, and that’s including cleanup.
The final gravity on the Liberty Pale ale was 1.012 on both batches (strange), so with a fudge of a starting gravity of 1.058 that gives me an alcohol content of 6.04% by volume. Wow, turned out stronger this time. Possibly due to all that extra time in the fermenter? Maybe. The nice thing is I have a ton of beer to tide me over for the next few months, which will give me time to brew and age my next beer- a Belgian style. Stay tuned!
Ruby Hooker Mead label
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