Bottled the Leffe last night, with less than spectacular results. Forgot to purchase priming sugar, no big deal, just adjusted and went with table sugar.
Auto siphon decided to be dumb once, gave me some bubbles, had to add a litle sanitized water to recreate my seal.
Big issue was that, despite my best efforts, I picked up some trub when racking to the bottling bucket. As a result, the last of my bucket just had too much sediment in it for me to keep the stupid bottling wand clear enough to bottle. I ended up with 43 2/3 bottles instead of 48... and I poured that 2/3, since it had lived through several nasty bubble issues AND had some trub in it. Really sucked, as I defintiely had enough volume for a full two cases of beer, but it became abundantly clear that the only way I'd get those last bottles would have been by removing the bottling tip, letting the junk flow, and dealing with a few oxidized bottles. I sadly poured the remainder.
To add insult to injury, this took far too long, I ended up in bed late again.
I know that it's fashionable to avoid secondaries unless you are doing fruit or wood, but I feel like I'd have avoided this issue had I racked to secondary first, then let that tiny bit of leftover trub settle before bottling.
On the bright side, I have enogh bottles now for my imperial nut brown.
Ah well. I should have 43 excellent beers, right?
I'll post a full blog entry with details and pics, if you care to read such.
