Picking the Recipe

This could get messy. This time I am trying to make something similar to Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale. Again, I found what I thought to be a good recipe online, but lost it. After I ordered the ingredients. So, of course, I have all these ingredients but don’t remember how to put them all together.

Now, normally, I’d just go with it, throw ‘em all in and see what happens. I like brewing for that reason – it’s much more like cooking than baking.

This time, however, I seem to have ordered ingredients to make both an all-grain version and an extract version. Or I ordered enough ingredients to make 10 gallons of beer. I have WAY too much grain.

So now I’m trying to find the recipe again. Is it this one? Or this one? How much will this one make? Damn.

I did, however, decide to go organic for this one, which means no matter which recipe I chose, I don’t have the right ingredients ’cause they weren’t available in organic varieties. So I can’t even figure it out by looking at my invoice and comparing it to the recipes.

Bottles

It’s almost time to put all this beer into bottles and that means I need bottles. Roughly five gallons of beer means roughly 60 bottles. Since I’ll be putting this batch into bottles and immediately starting another one with a shorter fermentation time, I’ll need to acquire a lot of bottles.

A few options come to mind for acquiring them:

• drinking a lot
• getting them from friends and neighbors
• buying them, or
• getting them from a local bar.

I’m opting for drinking a lot. But 60 is A LOT for me to finish in the time frame needed. Especially since most of my drinking is done in bars. And I’ll then have 60 beers and need another 60 in a few weeks. So I think I’m going to have to go for a combination of two or three of those options. I’ve got over 30 bottles saved on my own so far, and we’re having a bunch of people over tomorrow night, so that’ll help. It might even generate enough, but we’ll see. Probably not enough guys to pound through another 24.

I’m not a fan of buying bottles since I drink so much, so I think I’ll contact one of the bars on my block and try to get a bag of bottles from them. But I’d like to do at least one brew into 22s, so I’ll probably have to buy those.

Anyway, yesterday evening I spent a while trying to get labels off of the bottles I have. Most of them came off pretty well. In order of ease (for my own reference):

1. Sam Smith (no effort)
2. Sam Adams (easy)
3. Anchor (easy)
4. New Belgium (pretty easy)
5. New Holland (not bad)
6. Trader Joe’s (ugh)
7. Red Hook (nearly impossible, takes 2 days)

I soaked them overnight in a mix of bleach and dishwasher detergent. I know you’re not supposed to mix bleach with anything else, but if I cared about safety, I wouldn’t be making five gallons of beer in the first place.

Update: Having people over worked great. Now I have plenty of bottles and plenty of hangover. Also, putting bottles in the dishwasher is much easier than soaking them and trying to peel the labels off. I doubt it’s good for the dishwasher, and I’m definitely not using the heat dry. It worked for everything but the TJ’s bottles. I didn’t try the Red Hook ones.

fallen soldiers