Simonds IPA (1878)

I brewed an IPA back in October 2009 that was based on Simonds' 1878 recipe.  For 55 litres I mashed 17kg of pale malt and nearly 800g of EKG's.

True to form I drank half and stuck the other half in a cask.  And there it's been for the last 3 and a half months.  Until today, at least!

Today was bottling day and I ended up with 32 pints in 1 pint bottles.  I didn't prime it so it's going to take quite a while to condition.

The one's I bottled and drank before Christmas were quite sweet so the bitterness wasn't so apparent.  The rest has dried out much more in the cask and is mouth puckeringly bitter.  I had one pint and my mouth is now prickling with the hops.

So now it's the same old game of trying to put it somewhere where I won't drink it too soon.

Bottling chaos

Well, my plan of cask conditioning for a few weeks has gone down the pan.  I changed my mind and decided to bottle both casks today after just 3 days in the cask.  The picture shows the chaos that ensued!

Actually it didn't take very long.  9 gallons minus the ullage ended up as 67 pints bottled plus a pint sunk by myself.  All done in about 80 minutes.

This bottling form cask is very straight forward.  I use a "little bottler" connected to the cask tap.  To make things as easy as possible I brought my floor capper into the utility room.

I didn't use any priming sugar as there'll be a couple of gravity points worth left to ferment over time.  The only problem is I don't have a very good track record of giving my beers time to mature. The lure of the malty, hoppy lovliness is just too much for me.  Now where can I hide it so I don't drink it all???