Brewin' Again

This past Sunday was another fun day for Ryan and Matt!! They started the next step of their brewing process. They started out by cleaning the bottles they would soon be filling. They had to mix up some kind of cleansing concauction so soak the bottles in first.
Matt is preparing to rinse the bottles.
Here, Matt is rinsing the bottles in the cleanser, and next they will go on the bottle tree.
This is the bottle tree. It is used to let the bottles drip dry so there is no residue or lint from using anything else.
This is the glorious Ale Pail that has been sitting in the garage for two weeks. It has a small valve on the top that has been letting carbon dioxide escape while the fermentation process was happening.

Be careful if you ever get into my garage.....you just might drown........................


This was an exciting part of the day.........after two weeks, we were finally able to open the bucket and see what had been going on in there all this time!!! ......and this is what we found!!!!! eewwwwww......looks nasty to me!!!!!

I thought it smelled awful, but Ryan and Matt thought it was awesome. It burned my nose and my eyes.

They siphoned the beer from the first bucket into this bucket to get rid of some of that junk floating around in there. Then, they siphoned it a second time for the same reason.

After they sucked all the brew out, this is what was left. It stunk. But, once again, the boys thought it was awesome!!!!This is the second siphoning run. After this, they added the sugars to carbonate it.
TeShannah and I prowled in and out of the garage all day. Every once in awhile, we decided to help a little. TeShannah handed the boys the bottles when they were ready to fill.........
This is Matt's ginormous hand squeezed into a normal man-size glove, filling the bottles. The tube the beer flows through has a valve on the end that blocks the flow unless there is pressure on it. So, when you push, the beer flows. When you let up, it stops.Once each bottle was filled, we had to cap it.

This is the tool that is used to hold and compress the caps. It holds them with a little magnet.

You just set the cap on top of the bottle and compress each side. It's that simple.
I even got my hands in on that part. The deal is, I have to drink the beer I capped.........we'll see :-)
I thought I had to push real hard....that's what I'm doing here. But really, I could have broken the bottle doing it that way. Luckily, we only lost one bottle out of two cases because of that.
TA DA!!!!!!!!!!

So there you have it.....the first official West Middleton Whammer Ale will be ready to drink on December 22nd. I'll let you know how they did!!!!!