So the time has finally come to bottle the delicious Hop & Liefde clone, and man, am I excited! This boi has spent the last 12 days dry hopping under 100g of Citra flowers, and 100% ready to carbonate and go in my belly, and by my belly I really mean Mido’s and @Exyle’s bellies since this brew is for them! So Let’s go!
The Final Specs:
Firstly let’s talk about the specs, the beer has made it to 1008 FG which means a nice 4.73% abv, very damn near the target of 4.8% which I’m quite happy about. The colour is great too, a bright amber which is very appealing to the eyes. The calculated IBU is 57,3 although I have a feeling this was not reached due to inefficiency of too much hops placed in each hop bag when boiling. The aroma is a powerful mix of all yellow fruits from passion fruit, pineapple, orange and citrus. The body is very light, a little bit on the lighter side than what I wanted, but we will see if this affects the end beer after carbonation…
Cleaning and Prepping:
Let's start with the basics, sterilizing…
After cleaning and removing the labels of precisely 72x 0.3l bottles (it takes about 1h to clean 24 bottles perfectly), I had to sterilize them. It is not enough to use just soap, bacteria will still be around to spoil your beer if you don’t sterilize them with heat or agents. As for me, I picked a nice steam machine which consumes only 200ml of water per crate of 24 bottles. So, it’s fast, effective (100+ Celsius) and conserves lots of water. Other people will boil water and fill each bottle by half then cover them with aluminium foil, the hot water and residual steam do the job of sterilizing well, but you must use a lot of water for this. Other people may use cleaning agents like StarSan or PuroSan, and I have even seen others use the oven to heat the bottles to 100-150 Celsius, the nice thing about the last one is that the bottles remain completely dry until you prime them, as apposed to having droplets of residual water from the steam. My steamer works wonders though, and in just about 8 seconds the bottle is burning hot and steamy, and completely sterile. 72 bottles later, we are ready to prime.
Priming:
I felt like my last brew was a little bit under carbonated, which is Ok for a strong beer matured in barrel chips, but for an American Pale Ale, you really need more carbonation and a thick foam to go with. For this brew, I used 9.25g of malt sugar per litre of beer, as opposed to 8.0g/l for the Oak Royale. I diluted 250g of sugar into a volume of 450ml of water, and then added 5ml of the sugary solution to each bottle, so about 2.78g of sugar per bottle, which should result in a decent carbonation but not too intense. I used my sampling tube to prime each bottle one by one, after about nearly one hour of this, I was done, and it was time for a break in the form of Chinese food!
Bottling and Capping:
Let’s first open the fermenter and check it out…
WOW… absolutely nuts the smell of these Citra hops, probably one of the best beer aromas I’ve ever experienced, not because of the beer itself, but simply because getting your nose near the container full hops is just mesmerizing. I really wish I could share this aroma with everyone, maybe I’ll invite lots of friends over the next time I bottle this beer. 
Now comes the fun part, filling them bottles up! Let’s start by getting the suction rod in the barrel, connected by a standard pvc tube 1.5m long, which I prefilled with boiling water. Once I release the water from within the tube, the resulting vacuum created by the drawing of the water literally sucks the beer out of the fermenter and gravity will take care of the rest as I fill each bottle by opening and closing the end of the tube with a clip.
One by one I was filling the bottles and as the level of the beer lowered, I started to notice some small bits of hop petals making it through the tube and into the beer, I think at least 5-6 bottles ended up with small hop bits in them. I tried to move the suction rod up and down to stay clear of the hops but it was no use, they were still making through. So I had to appeal to the brewing bag to provide me with a filter, and I attached the bag to the end of the pvc tube and it worked like a charm, no more hops in the beer! Although, it was a bit more difficult to control the clip to stop the filling and so I overfilled a few bottles and had to empty a little bit in the sink, in total another half a cup of beer lost due to this problem. Next time I dry hop, I will need to get a small nylon filter to attached to the tube right from the start, which should fix both issues. So... 69 Bottles later, we were done!!
I filled every bottle until the last drop of beer from the fermenter, and luckily I only noticed the pale east going through on the very last bottle, so very good clarity from beginning to end.
was in charge of the bottling, we chose white caps for Mido and silver caps for , in a proportion of 1:2 respectively. The total amount of 69x 0.3l bottles means a final lot of 20.7 litres, an ideal batch amount, just wish we reached exactly 3 full crates.
After finishing off, I had to do one last thing before cleaning, sticking my hand in those delicious hops and taking a close up shot (as well as one last good whiff). Man, this was a great experience and I was really happy with the results, I can’t wait to open the test bottle in a week’s time to see how the carbonation has developed.
One more project done, and now my eyes are set in the next project, the Old World Russian Imperial Stout from Brewdog, Bring It On!
Cheers!