For all my friends who make fun of me when I say Davis is the Bike Capitol of the United States:

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Baby's First Bottl(ing Day)

As promised: a blog entry about bottling!

I broke my bottling into two days of work.  Day one was infinitely worse.

DAY 1:  Label removing from approximately 57 bottles of beer (on the wall*)
It was tedious and after I was about 2/3 of the way done, my dad found a more efficient way to achieve my goals of removing all the adhesive.

Washed, de-labeled, and ready for sanitizing!

DAY 2: The actual bottling
First I transfered all of the delicious smelling uncarbonated beer into the bottling bucket along with a sugar solution (same kind of bucket, just with a spigot).

That's my "stop taking pictures and help me" look.

Then I filled forty-some odd bottles with the beer with a nifty little filling tube thing.  My mom helped a lot.  The red contraption on the counter in the picture below is what closed down the caps on the bottles.

And now we wait, again.  The beer should be fully carbonated in about two weeks.  And then I can drink the fruits (hops?) of my labor!

Side note: I'm still taking suggestions for my "brewery" name!

*No beer was actually on the wall.  Hopefully you don't have that song stuck in your head now like I do.

Adventures in Alcohol

Maybe it's because I'm a geologist, maybe it's because I collect bottle caps, or maybe because it just goes so well with baseball, but the truth is, I drink a lot of beer.  And I think my parents noticed, since for Christmas they bought me a beer brewing kit.

So what did I do while that super exciting Super Bowl was on yesterday?  You guessed it, I brewed some beer!

Ingredients: grain, hops, malt, and yeast! (not pictured: water)

I thought I'd enjoy a beer while brewing.

Science!

And ready to ferment.

And now I wait.  In 3-6 weeks it should be ready to bottle.  Which means in 3-6 weeks I need to accumulate about two cases worth of beer bottles (as if I needed an excuse to drink more beer).  So check back here in 3-6 weeks to hear how bottling goes!  And a couple weeks after that, I'll hopefully have 5 gallons of delicious red ale (name TBD).