End of an Era

A short but beautiful partnership in brewing ended last Wednesday when my good friend Brian moved back home to attend graduate school at LSU. Yet, one tasked remained; so I enlisted my girlfriend to assist me in bottling the Granfalloons Tripel that Brian and I had brewed.

We set to work moving the carboy with the beer in it upstairs and then cleaning another carboy and all the implements of bottling. A small snafu manifested itself in the form of a nearly empty iodophor bottle, but there was just enough to fill the carboy with sanitization fluid.

Finally, the time had come for a wet and low-down battle with bottles. Half of the bottles were ones I had recently accumulated so I knew that they had been rinsed well. However, they did possess the bane of a homebrewer’s existence: stubborn labels. The rest of our crop of bottles were donations from a friend of Brian’s that were label-less but dusty. We checked the latter group for any hardcore gunk or suspicious growth and rejected a few on those grounds. After much scrubbing, peeling and rinsing, we had enough bottles for the batch.

We transferred the sanitization fluid to the bottles and then transferred the beer to the clean, empty carboy. Then the sanitization fluid got dumped into a bucket with all of the tubes and bottling implements and the bottles got a final rinse, thus concluding the battle of the bottles with the brewers emerging victorious. We celebrated by filling our vanquished foes with golden liquid.

A quick gravity reading and then in with the priming sugar and off we went. I filled the bottles while my girlfriend capped and stirred the beer to keep the dextrose in equal suspension. The actual bottling went incredibly fast and we yielded twenty-three 22oz bottles and one 330mL champagne bottle. After the final clean up, we packed all of my gear into its respective boxes and loaded it into the car.

It is sad to see Brian and I’s brewing adventures come to an end, but I have talked another friend into allowing me to brew at his house with him and even though he has only brewed a few batches, he is quite knowledgeable about all things beer.

The reward for all of our labor came in the form of tasting the first bottle of Brian and I’s first batch, the Bagombo IPA. Pouring golden yellow and pretty clear, the bubbles were a bit sluggish, but I expected the carbonation to be a little low only two weeks after bottling. Grapefruit and fresh flowers fill the nose and the first sip reveals much of the same with a sweet candy finish. Another taste reveals complexities in the malt backbone while pine and cut grass accents come out in the hop profile. Not as overwhelmingly delicious as I remember previous batches, but a solid citrusy IPA none-the-less. A little more time resting peacefully in the bottle will help round this one out. Lucky I am leaving for California tomorrow so I am not tempted to drink them as is.

Thirsty Zymurgist Score: 39/50