Bottle, Transfer, and Tasting

Last weekend saw a lot of action at the home brewery. Let's start at the beginning with the bottling of the Dubbel Trubbel (Belgian-style abbey dubbel) that I brewed back in early July.

Ready to go

This beer was in the secondary for almost two months. I think the Better Bottle I used worked really well.

Better Bottle

I decided to use dry malt extract (DME) to carbonate this beer, hopefully to avoid the "gushing" problems that I experienced with the bitter (although this dubbel is well above 7% ABV and I think it would be less likely to happen). Boiling the DME gave the kitchen that lovely malt aroma that we all love.

DME

I think the color/malt profile/yeast flavors of the beer turned out great. The only thing that I am concerned about is a hot alcohol taste that could be a result of fermenting at too high of a temp, although I think that the temps were fine for this yeast strain. We'll see how it mellows out in the bottle.

Tasting glass

Of course, Davy was as helpful as usual in his role as the brewhouse cat.

Davy after a long day in the brewery

With the Better Bottle now open, I decided to transfer the Orange that we brewed several weeks ago to the secondary (so that I have a primary open to brew the graduation mystery beer). This thing tasted great, with a great flavor from the orange zest, and I can't wait until it's ready to go.

Before

After

Finally, I had sampled the second batch of the Saison Jaison (petite saison) a little while ago, but I think that it is now ready for consumption. The color is almost identical to the original batch, and although the hop flavor at first seemed a little sharper (perhaps from not using hop bags?), it was actually not that different when tasted side-by-side with a bottle of the original. At any rate, this is still a great beer to have on hand.

Saison Jason v. 2.0