w00t! Bottling Day! I'll upload pictures later, but there are pictures! I'll post a link in another post in a day or two when I get around to posting them (as well as the PAX05 pictures that I haven't gotten up yet).

I woke up around 10am, and thought, I want to bottle today. I didn't actually get around to it until sometime after 8pm. Go me! But either way, it worked out well, there were five us that ended up bottling everything. We had a nice assembly line going. I think I probably under filled most of the bottles by an ounce or two, but oh well, I'll do better next time.

Anyways, I haven't bothered checking the gravity, and I didn't bother to check it until after I had everything prepped. It did seem a tiny bit high, but should still be ok, I guess I'll know in a few days when the bottles explode or not :)

Either way, I think it'll turn out reasonably well. Some of us tried some while the priming solution was heating up, and our collective opinion was that it was pretty damn good. A bit light in my opinion, but I think between the carbonation and the sugar content that was added during this final step should produce a might fine first attempt. This makes me damn freaking happy. I was worried something would go wrong, but today went so flawlessly, that my hopes have been restored. And in two weeks or so, we will have the first official taste test. I hope to get a bunch of people over for a tasting, or at least subject as many people to this as possible to get a nice range of opinions.

I also decided sometime over the weekend that the 22oz bottles really are not ideal for the first attempt. So, I went and picked up 2 cases worth of 12oz bottles (48 total). Like I said earlier, I think i underfilled a tiny bit, (the beer only just comes to the neck instead of filling it up), but all should be well. Its a first attempt, mistakes are expected and excepted.

But anyways, I feel like I'm rambling, and I have to be up early to go shooting apparently. I was expecting 10am, not 8. Oh well, it should be fun either way.

Oh, and one last thing. We had considered taking the last few inches of beer from the secondary fermenter (the stuff with the yeast cake and what not), and bottling that as well in seperate bottles, but after it boiled over trying to prime it, I decided it wasn't worth the risk and just threw it out. It would've been horrible to try anyways, so no real loss.

w00t!

--nullpuppy(out)