Bottling Beer #2

Today (Saturday, November 19) was bottling day for Beer #2, the Bavarian Hefeweizen. The beer was in the fermenter bucket for almost three weeks. The recipe calls for two weeks, but the yeast seemed so active for so long, I thought it might be prudent to let the yeast settle more. I also noticed that comments regarding the ingredient kit on Northern Brewer's website stated that three weeks were used on some occasions.

When the lid was opened, Kim and I thought the beer looked dark--an amber color. But once I took a sample and held it up, the beer looked much lighter, cloudy, and certainly resembled a hefeweizen. The beer smelled like banana and cloves. Tasted good.  

Bavarian Hefeweizen Sample

Music: Grateful Dead's Road Trips Vol. 4, No. 4 - Philly Spectrum 1982-04-06.

Bottling went fairly smooth. The following are some notes:

• I could not take the final gravity reading because I didn't quite have a big enough sample, the hydrometer touched the bottom.
• I forgot to put the priming sugar solution into the bottling bucket first, so I poured it in last and stirred gently with a sanitized spoon.
• Because I started with a little more than 5 gallons and the hefeweizen produced less trub, I ended up with two extra 12 ounce bottles and a 22 ounce bottle of beer. Because those bottles were sanitized a little half-hazardously, I marked their bottle caps (2x) so that I would know if off flavors, etc. resulted from deviations from the process. I suspect the beer will be fine, we'll see. In the future, I should have some extra bottles cleaned and sanitized in case I have the same issue.
• Because this is the second beer, and the first beer is in similar looking bottles and caps, I did mark the bottle caps with a number "2," using a fine-point Sharpie.