Yankiwi Pale is bottled

Batch #3 of my homebrew has been bottled today. I'm calling it Yankiwi Pale because it's based on an American Pale Ale recipe but with some New Zealand hops.

The bottling process did not go entirely without incident, but hopefully it's all OK. First of all I racked the beer off from the fermenter into a second fermentation vessel containing a measured amount of sugar water (a priming solution used to generate CO2 in the bottles). There's a picture of the setup here:

Anyway, the beer started running down the siphon tube into the second fermnter (from where I would bottle it) but then stopped. At first I thought I'd got n airlock but I quickly realised that something was blocking the tap on the top fermenter. It turned out to be the hop "teabag" I'd used to add some extra hop aroma during fermentation. I had to quickly sanitise a stirring paddle and free the tap.

This was a bit annoying as it stirred up some of the sediment at the bottom of the fermnter. I'd just spent 2 weeks cold-conditioning the beer to settle the sediment out, so stirring it up again was very annoying.

Still, the beer does look fairly clear, as you should be able to see from this photo:

I also measured the final gravity using the hydrometer which you can also see in the photo. I used the calculation tool in the BeerSmith software I use to work out the alcohol content of my beer. Due to the problems I had with undissolved malt extract (see earlier posts) the strength was lower than I planned - 3.4% ABV.

After that I was left with 22 litres of primed clear beer which I put into a variety of bottles. It now needs to sit for at least a couple of weeks to condition and for the CO2 to be generated. Based on my experience to date, I'll be trying to leave it for at least 4 weeks before I drink it, but I'm not sure I'll hold out that long before I sneak a sample! When I tasted it straight off the fermenter it tasted pretty good, so I'm fairly hopeful that it will be better once it has had time to condition.