Bottling the ESB!

The bottle-washer is the best invention ever! $9.95 attachment to a faucet (plus $1 hose to kitchen faucet adapter), and you eliminate the effort cleaning bottles. Love it.

And the whole process start to finish took about 3.5 hours. This included 45 minutes for heat sanitizing the bottles. I can credit a few factors for the relatively short time expenditure this second effort:

• As always, a great brew-buddy - this time Lissa
• Bottles de-labeled in advance - much less exhausting
• Better organization, more familiarity with procedure
• Bottle washer! (deserves second mention)

I had a little scare with this batch. As with the first, I sanitized everything with C-Brite, according to instructions. When chatting with Keystone, erroneously I mentioned B-Brite, and they said, that is a cleaner, not a sanitizer - and I thought I had not sanitized at all!

That would have been bad. But if it were true, why did the first batch work? The answer is, that I had done it fine after all, but I was scared for a moment that I would open up the ESB to find a massive bacterial infection. Nope, it looked great.

Final Gravity: 1.010 - so alcohol 3.5% - less than expected, but it should be yummy anyway. One week to find out!