Another day, another brew

Brews a plenty here in the Toguchi household lately.

Let me catch you up on what has been going on with the Imperial Stout.  After I finished up the primary (see previous post on what happened with that), I transfered the stout to the carboy and let it clarify for another 10 days.  That was pretty uneventful, but it was interesting to see the beer ferment a little more.  I boiled up my priming sugar to prep for the bottling and cleaned up all the tools to get the job done, including all the darned bottles.

First things first though.  I had to get the final gravity reading.  Since I don't have a nice long test tube or anything narrow and cylindrical, I use the holding tube for the hydrometer to take my readings.  I know, it's pretty ghetto, but it gets the job done.  Siphon a bit of the brew into the tube, drop the hydrometer and take a reading.  The final reading is exactly what was expected!  (whew)

After transferring the goodness over to my bottling bucket, I found out that I lost over a gallon of liquid during the great beer blowout of 2011.  Oh well, not much I can do about it now.  I ended up bottling about a case and a half of beer total.  I used the Oxygen resistant bottle caps this time.  They say to use these caps if you want to have your beer last a little longer.  Given that these suckers are 10% abv, I would expect them to last longer than the Scottish Ale that is completely gone.  I would expect to be able to crack open one of these babies in about a week.  I'm looking forward to it :)