99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

Chief Assistant Brew Demon Joel and I are seen here shoving unsuspecting beer into dark brown bottles for the final stages of fermentation and conditioning.

Joel is serving appropriate bitch duty by cleaning out the bottles; a task which he dives into with the normal amount of Joel-related gusto. The bottles were really really really clean.


And then the bottling begins. After adding some corn sugar to the beer to re-awaken the yeast for bottle conditioning and final alcohol content, we started the relatively tedious process of bottling and capping. As you can see, Joel is amazingly proud of his first bottle of beer. I'm proud for him. Joel is certainly my best (and only) Chief Assistant Beer Demon. We took a measurement; the alcohol content is already a little over 5%. When all is said and done, this shold hopefully be in the ballpark of 8%.

The harshness of the flavors, especially the choice of barley we used, will require a longer-than-normal conditioning period. Most ales are ready for drinking in 2 or 3 weeks. This bad bear? June.

I am struggling to come up with a name for this beer, but my buddy Hoss in Denver CO came up with this name for my Russian Imperial Stout:

Anastasia's Assassination Russian Imperial Style Stout. Perfect.