Dopplebock bottling Party
Well the Bottling Party was complete success. Infact, it was such a great turnout, that maybe we should do it again?
I got to work early Saturday morning, and by 8:30am I had everything setup and ready to go. One of the first people to arrive was Bob, a homebrewer from Cedar Rapids. I had never met him before, but I was glad to see him! We started right away, filling and capping the first bottles. We had told most people to arrive about 10am, because we thought it would take a while to get going, and I didn’t want people to show up and have nothing to do (they might leave!). The plan worked well, because by 10am we had lots of bottles already filled and capped, and we put the new people to work doing the really hard part, labeling!
At the peak of things, around 11am, we had more than twenty people lending a hand. It was great. I would almost call it a ‘flash mob’, especially since I since I didnt know many of the people there. With all the help, we were finished bottling the 1300 bottles by about 12:30. Pretty good time! The “frankenfiller” that Chris designed work really well, and most of the homebrewers there seemed pretty impressed by it. I learned pretty quickly that if I filled the bottles and closed the main valve, that all of the fill levels in the bottles would even out (due to atmospheric pressure). So getting a consistent fill level was actually quite simple.
Well we will know how everything turns out in two weeks. Thats the standard time it takes for bottle conditioned beer to reach full carbonation. I’ll let you know when its ready, and when we have it for sale in the salesroom. We’ll have to do this again in twenty years!
Me filling the bottles four at a time. Buckley is behind me pre-rinsing the bottles in a bucket.
Our capping crew going at it with there own cappers. We had way more capppers than we could use!
Labeling the bottles by hand was the really important part. First they had to be dried, and then the backing peeled of each label and applied with a steady hand.
The finished product!
Chris, our new salesroom help, stacking the finished bottles onto a pallet. We made two pallets, they are now in our warehouse conditioning.
People lingered after we were done and celebrated the event.
June 22nd, 2005 at 11:55 am
Had fun. Would do it again.
July 8th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
[…] eer was made to commemorate our 20th Anniversary. It took plenty of time and expense, and extra elbow grease to make this beer happen. Because of this and its limited 1000 bottle release in […]