Busy brew day

OK, first homebrew related post. All day I have thought of things I should post. In my mind I came up with a list of 100 things to blog about. I think I will have plenty of material to keep this blog going for at least 3 weeks. OK, hopefully longer.

Today was a fairly busy day with my beer. I started the day with an oatmeal stout, a Fat Tire belgium ale clone and a Pilsner Urquell clone kit (from NorthernBrewer.com) in primaries. The Pilsner was just brewed on New Years day (more on that some other time). In a secondary I had a Bavarian Helles (also a kit from NorthernBrewer.com). The Bavarian was brewed on October 19th and sat in my garage until November 11th when it got too cold.

I bottled the Helles and transferred the stout and Fat Tire to secondaries. I just let the Pilsner bubble away.

I hate bottling. I hope someday to keg my beer (maybe when my bar is completed after my basement gets finished etc... That's another post). I've started using my dishwasher to sanitize my bottles. This works great. The dishwasher doesn't clean the bottles, since the water does not get squirted into them. So, they have to be cleaned before hand. As long as I rinse them out right after emptying them, cleaning them is easy. I use my bottle washer and give each bottle a 5 second squirt, put them in the dishwasher and start the machine and walk away for 80 minutes. The 'sanitize' cycle on the dishwasher does the trick, and it is a lot less labor intensive.