Last weekend the Brewers had a bottling session for the last two big beers that were brewed this spring. Beer #14 was Brewer Joe’s  imperial smoked porter. It smelled and tasted great with the smoked character coming through well. My experience is that the smokey essence tends to get reduced in the final product. Whether this is due to the temperature, the alcohol, or just aging, I don’t know.

While bottling we did some research. This included these three interesting beers:

The actual bottling went well, but because it was a double session, real estate was limited.

After the porter, we bottled #15, my imperial stout. Although, we added a few bourbon soaked oak spirals, the bourbon and oak was barely perceptible if at all.

We added a refractometer to the equipment, but it didn’t seem accurate on the finished dark, high gravity beers, I think color and alcohol both affect the reading, so I will have to read up on how to interpret the readings.

A couple of exploded bottles in previous batches spooked us a little so Brewer Chris slightly reduced the priming sugar for the barleywine as well as these two beers from what we had been adding. The barleywine is not carbonating very quickly. It has been a couple of months and there is almost no carbonation yet. I suspect that the high alcohol content may be a contributor. We have agreed to be patient and hope that time will solve that problem. In reality these big beers will need a year or more to reach maturity anyway. It will be interesting to see if the porter and stout have the same slow carbonation.

When the bottling was finished, there was another research session conducted on the porch.

post bottling research session