English Bitters
I started an English Bitters, the last of my brew kits, back in November, and just bottled it this weekend. Normally it takes 2-3 weeks before bottling, but I goofed.
I had a bit of extra corn sugar (dextrose) leftover in the bag I’d opened and I thought adding extra would up the alcohol content and that would be that. Something like an English bitters (Newcastle, etc.) should taste fine with a bit more alcoholic punch, I thought. Well, things were a bit more responsive than usual in the fermenting bucket and at the end of the two week period when I would normally siphon everything into a carboy to finish before bottling, I had nice patches of mold all over the top of my beer.
I thought I’d screwed up the batch entirely, but before I dumped it, I decided to ask someone that knew more about these matters than me, so I went onto the Internet. I read many reports of how mold was fine and nothing to worry about, but it still worried me, until I finally read one account where a guy posted a picture of a mold issue much, much worse than mine with a caption that read: “One of the best beers I ever made and I lived to tell you about it.”
So I siphoned everything below the mold into a carboy and thought I’d be able to bottle in a week. There was still a lot of action going on in there, so much so that things started to bubble over through the filter plugged in at the top. After a week, it was definitely not ready to bottle. This brew was supposed to be called “Holiday Cheer” and be ready in time for Christmas. Instead, we blew by Christmas, New Year’s, and into a bit of January before I noticed that bubbles were no longer forming in the carboy.
I did a few hydrometer readings over the course of a week and determined that things were finally under control before I decided to bottle. Since there was more sugar and more time to do its thing, there was an awful lot more sediment this time. I had also somehow whittled down my collection of bottles. So I siphoned off what I thought would be about 48 bottles worth (two cases), primed it with sugar so that it would carbonate in the bottles and then went along bottling everything.
I’m hoping in two weeks I will have a drinkable brew, but I am also anticipating explosions after I neglected to account for removing a third of the liquid when calculating how much dextrose to add at the final moments. I’m hoping for a miracle brew, but I’d be happy with anything remotely drinkable at this point.