99 bottles of beer on the wall...

Well, maybe not 99 bottles. 47 12-ouncers and two tall boys actually, sitting in the 'study/office/brewery' room. By tomorrow, they will have been bottled for one week, with three weeks to go. It may seem like a long time, but to be honest, time has been flying by for me so it won't feel too long before I'm cracking one open for a taste. Might try one next week, just to see what it tastes like.

I have no idea as to how tasty my beverages will be. There are a variety of possible influences and mistakes that may affect the flavor. I had two sets of directions telling me what to do, one that came with the pre-mix malt and one that came with the homebrew kit, and tried to follow both as much as possible. The result? Who knows. Hopefully drinkable at the very least.

Bottling was interesting. Using gravity and a siphon, I transferred the beer from the carboy fermenter to the big white bottling bucket.

Bottling Bucket

Extreme Siphoning Action

Look! Gravity!

I then attached a hose and bottle filler to the valve stem. The bottle filler is really an awesome tool to use. You simply put it into the bottle until the tip presses against the bottom and beer comes out, filling up the bottle. Simply pick it up from the bottom when the bottle is almost full, leaving an inch to inch and a half of air. It made that part of the process really easy. Capping was easy as well, simply put a cap on, press the capper down and SHAZAM, you have a capped bottle. More pics. 

Filling bottles like a champ

The bottle capper in action

The first bottle capped

My first batch in all its bottled glory

So that was fun. Now we wait. The bottles are supposed to sit at a temp around 50 degrees, which I cannot really do in my apartment, other than open a window in the room and see what happens. The temperature fluctuates some, so that too may affect the end product. Also, I was supposed to add more sugar at the beginning of the siphoning process from carboy to bucket, which I forgot to do until the end. Not all the sugar dissolved and the later bottled beers likely had more sugar than the earlier bottled beers, as the sugar sat in the bottom while I bottled, so technically some beers will have more alcohol content than others. Regardless, let's just say there was some human error involved in this whole beer-making process and leave it at that. We will know when I try it. Well, I will know. Maybe I just won't tell anyone. I'll just lie and say it's delicious no matter what and only those few who get to try it will know the truth. I may have to bribe them to keep them quiet, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. 

Anyways, let's talk about writing, since that was the original purpose of this blog in the first place. I'm onto my second round of editing, using notes from a friend that were very enlightening. This round of editing is even more difficult to get through than the last. The plan is to finish the editing this month and hopefully write another 50k-ish section in February. I'm thinking the whole novel might be 150k or so words, which is pretty average for a fantasy epic. Hopefully, I'll have it all polished and ready by August next year, so I can publish on createspace, which, because I won nanowrimo, I will get five free bound copies. It is actually very cool, and will look more into it when I'm closer to that step. 

That's all for today, another Sunday past. I'm happy I've been keeping up my blogposting in a regular fashion, and hope those few readers of mine enjoy reading it. 

 “I like beer. On occasion, I will even drink beer to celebrate a major event such as the fall of Communism or the fact that the refrigerator is still working.” – Dave Berry