Bottling the Porter: 5.6% ABV

These are the new German bottles I acquired.

A few weeks back I posted about the White House Honey Porter partial malt kit Mary gave me for Christmas.  That post, which highlights two substitutions I had made to the recipe – I used local honey from Luray instead of the Wisconsin ingredient that was provided, and I used locally grown US Fuggles leaf hops instead of the Hallertauer that was provided, can be found here:

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/01/brewing-porter-with-local-flavors.html

Siphoning into the bottling tub, where the
priming sugar solution is mixed in.

Bottling went along smoothly, with few issues to note.  The process takes a little while – probably two hours max, but I feel like I get done in less than that, including clean up.  Also, I got to use my new bottles that I collected from the new beer and wine store near work, which hold slightly more than a pint at 16.9 ounces.

Here are all the bottles I used for the batch.

Here are two photos of the siphoning from the carboy into the bottling tub, where the priming sugar solutions is mixed in, and of the bottle tree with the full schedule for this session.

As I did with the saison, I obtained the final gravity for this beer.  It came in at 1.012; with an O.G. of 1.054 I come up with a calculated alcohol by volume of 5.6 percent for the porter.  That’s decent, but much lower than the saison, which came in at 8.4 percent. 

Hydrometer reads 1.012 - a 5.6% brew!

As far as output goes, I bottled 625 ounces of the porter, just less than five gallons.  The following is the bottling schedule:

• 7 quarts
• 7 pints
• 8 16.9 ounce German bottles
• 7 22 ounce bottles

So I’ll give this two weeks to condition in the bottle, and it should be ready for a go.  Looking forward to that!