Symptom of the Brew-niverse and other beer-ings

I bottled my saison earlier today (Saisons dans l'abime).

My previous dealings with gushers were caused by one of two things -- too much priming sugar or not enough sanitation.

I decided to focus on the sanitation issue.  I made sure everything was cleaned twice, and I also sanitized my previously untouched bottle caps (I guess I thought they were too small to make a difference).



I took an unconventional approach to my priming liquid as well.  Instead of just boiling a small amount of water with sugar, I decided to boil a large amount of water as tea with brown sugar.  I was thinking about doing one as tea, and it kind of fits the saison style.  This also fit the volume thing I wanted to do.  You see, this particular beer was just projecting to end up too high on the ABV scale, so I had to kill that a little bit while still retaining flavor.  The brown sugar was done, just cos.  I really had no reason for that than just to see how it would be different.  I used a little bit less then I have in the past (I have yet to get 50 bottles out of a batch) so I'm hoping they don't end up too flat.

I ended up with 43 bottles -- a very worthy amount.

Anyways, I had to stop by the home brew store today, so I picked up ingredients for my next beer.

It is going to be a coffee porter, using like a session brown porter as a base.  I am going to call it "Symptom of the Brew-niverse" (after the kick-ass Sabbath song, naturally).

It will be my first time using Fuggles hops, and the hopping will be kind of similar to last batch, in that hops will be mixed and divided -- though much differently.  It will also be my first time working with carafa.  The coffee will be added in a secondary fermentation, directly adding grinded beans to essentially cold brew the coffee in the beer.

And now, if you've never heard the song, like a bunch of different versions of it...










The ending section really gives a lot of space for a musician to explore

-- Knuttel