Happenings at Hacksaw Brewery

Everyone once in a while a lot of homebrewing related activities seem to happen all at the same time. This past Thursday was one of those days so I wanted to show you just how much you can get done in one evening if you're prepared!

The brewery workday started out with pulling every single bottle out of my wonderful Beer Cave. The label stripping and cleaning of these bottles was done over the last couple brew sessions. I was thankful to have all that done and just be able to pull the bottles out.  Also went ahead and got all my bottling equipment and the beers out. All of this would be needed for the tasks at hand.



The Mission:
Bottle from Secondary Predator Bourbon Imperial Stout
Bottle from keg Run for your Life Session IPA
Bottle from keg For the Ladies Caramel Hard Cider
Keg Thanksgiving Porter

Using some of the techniques described in our Learn to Brew Part 3 I embarked upon this mission starting with the bottling of the Predator. This beer was actually a joint brew with Down the Hall and it had been sitting for several months as I aged it with some bourbon soaked oak chips. The lengthy aging time meant I needed to add some more yeast. I basically just cut open a packet of SafeAle US-05 and slow sprinkled it in while it was transferring.

Oh don't forget to heat up that sugar water BEFORE you start transferring wort. I dump in the sugar mixture (5/8 cup sugar dissolved into 2 cups water). Here is how I dissolve my sugar into the mixture.

As you can see - this isn't exactly rocket science. Notice the water is clear as all of the sugar has dissolved. It doesn't have to get up to a boil to make this happen, but it is such a small amount of liquid compared to your full batch that it won't hurt it even if it is boiling when you dump it in.

After I got all the Predator bottled it was time to keg the Thanksgiving porter.Below is me sanitizing the keg first. Trust me - I made SURE to get the sanitizer solution out before putting the beer in there lest I have another instance of my Epic Failure.

With the beer happily kegged (and me realizing just how much I love kegging) I moved on to bottling round 2. This would involve a sweet little invention called the Blichman Beer Gun. This is a great creation that makes bottling from the keg a cinch. I don't plug stuff unless I have experience with it and as you see below... I got quite a lot of experience with it.

When doing this much bottling in a single day it can be easy to get beers confused. To help out with this I used 3 different kinds of bottle caps I had kind of floating around in my inventory. They needed to get used up anyway!

A long night at the Hacksaw Brewery - but the stats at the end of the night

50 bottles Predator
30 bottles Cider
15 bottles Session IPA
1 keg Porter

Mission completed. And of course it's nice to see all your handiwork waiting to be consumed and sitting pretty in the Beer Cave! Check out those chalkboard walls being put to good use :)

--Ben