It was mid-evening, and we'd finished up our shopping errands and finished dealing with UPS Documentation Fail™ and we were deciding what do to with the balance of the evening. Lizz said, "Let's bottle?!?" and I said, "Sure!"

Delores Herbig, started on 12/18/2010 got bottled last night. Since it was our second bottling day, we kind of had a system going and it only took a little over an hour-ish. Not bad really.

Fermentation went a little long, but it was still fermenting anyway, so... ;) SG was somewhere around 1.010 - 1.012-ish. Tasted it at bottling, and there's an "odd" flavor there in the background that I can't really describe or identify. It's not unpleasant at all - more of an "I didn't expect that" type of thing vs. an "OMG, I did something wrong!" thing. It may be a character of the yeast I used. Obviously, after 10-14 days in the bottle, it'll be nice and carbonated, and we'll chill it before the "real" tasting, so it should taste completely different than at bottling, where it's flat and room-temp.

All in all, pretty happy with the brew. Our next project will be a Specialty Ale category beer that Lizz dreamed up last night. We're both pretty excited about it, and we'll probably be getting the ingredients down at GF this weekend. We'll also be brewing another batch of the Black IPA that was the first beer we did - it's that good, and it needs to be tweaked a little bit. Batch #2 of that stuff should be even better than #1, with better technique and care during the process.

Anyway, short entry today; just wanted to report back on brewing activities for those readers that primarily read the blog for brewing stories. :)