All bottled up

Last night was a really busy night. On Tuesday, I went up to Nashua Garden to meet with David and Chris Aillon for food and drinks after an especially rough day at work. Well that killed everything I planned on doing that night, so I had to make up for it last night by getting tons of things done. Among other things, I had to bottle my pumpkin beer that I have previously talked about.

I made it at the beginning of October, but it’s taken several weeks for it to be ready to bottle. First I had to wait for it to finish primary fermentation before adding the pumpkin and spices. Once I did that, it took another week or so until I decided there was enough pumpkin flavor before transferring it to another fermenter. Then I had to let it sit there for several days because the transfer kicked the fermentation back up and I needed to let it finish. Well yesterday I finally decided it was ready. The bottling went pretty smoothly and quickly.

Unfortunately a fair amount of pumpkin debris made it into the bottling bucket, so I had to leave a lot of beer behind. Because of this and the several transfers during brewing, I only got about four gallons of beer instead of the usual five. The real problem here is that I am concerned about some pumpkin debris ending up in the bottles. I checked a couple of the last ones I botled earlier and saw some floaters on top, but hopefully that’s isolated to the last few bottles. While I don’t think it would cause any problems outside of cosmetic, I would still hate for bottles to have layers of pumpkin floating on top.

Bottling goes a lot quicker with two people as you can get one person just working the filler and another person just working the capper. It works like an assembly line then. Like that, I can bottle an entire batch in well under an hour. By myself, it takes a bit over an hour since I have to stop after filling six bottles to cap them. Ideally, I would just ditch bottling altogether and start kegging, which would mean I’d only have to clean and fill one large container.

In other news, there’s been all sorts of crazy announcements from companies about Linux in the past week. These are going to have big effects on Red Hat, but I don’t yet have my thoughts put together about them so I can’t post about it yet. I’ll try to do that within the next couple days.