By Greg B.  As promised, I’d follow this beer through with updates at the different stages.  The beer has been in the secondary since 12/15/08, at which time the gravity had come down from 1.104 to 1.030.  With December almost gone (today is 12/29/08) I decided to bottle the beer, and see what happens.

After sterilizing everything under the sun, I removed a small portion of the beer to a pan to heat up and mix in the priming sugar.  I also took a small sample into a wine thief containing my hydrometer, to get a reading of the gravity.  Over the last two weeks in the secondary, the gravity had come down, but not to the 1.020 I wanted, it had only come to 1.026.  Now, I could have let it sit for another few weeks, but I’m not that patient.  I am slightly worried that the yeast will be dead from the high alcohol content, but I think the Irish Ale yeast are among the most resilient yeast one can buy, so I’m betting they’ll be alive and well in the bottle for conditioning.  Given the numbers I get from my hydrometer, I can re-estimate my abv from 12% to a little under 11%, in that 10.5-11% range.  However, knowing that there are still fermentable sugars in the beer, I cut back the amount of priming sugar I added, so these bottles don’t eventually explode.

While the priming sugar and beer were heating up and going into solution, I finished washing and sterilizing my bottles.  Then I added the sugar/beer solution to a sterile glass carboy, and decanted the beer from the original secondary into this new carboy, allowing all the sugar solution to mix in equally with the beer, so to make sure each bottled beer has more or less the same amount of carbonation.  I was careful to not pick up any sediment, of which there was a bunch, from the secondary as well as to not suck up any of the residual floating bits, be they from the spices or the hops.

Once in this new carboy, bottling begins in earnest.  Oxygen is a beer’s worst enemy, so time is very short.  I quickly lined up all the bottles, plus whatever extra I cleaned, on a towel and began to fill them.  The beer smells pretty interesting actually, sometimes a bit like a barley wine, other times a bit like a very spicy winter ale, so I’m kind of anxious to try this.  I filled a variety of bottles this time, at least 24 12oz bottles, 12 of the 16oz swing top bottles, and a few larger 22oz bottles and some 12oz straglers as well.

Bottled, capped and boxed, the beer is now waiting a few weeks until I give it a shot.  I’ll post more on that once it occurs, but I’m excited about this beer.  I already know some of the changes I’d like to do (like use some pale malts in the recipe… only dark malts, what was I thinking!), but I’m curious to see how this beer turns out.  Only time will tell!