Bottling my mistake

Well it was more a panic than a mistake. It was time to restock and I decided I would use what leftovers that was lying about.

Popped down to the cheap shop which sells home brew stuff got a Coopers IPA, funny enough it was their last too.

So I brewed up:

1 tin Coppers IPA
1 tin Coopers light malt (had)
500g medium spray malt (had)
~250g of cheap honey from Aldi (had)
~200g of brown sugar (had)
And about ~80g of some random caster sugar that was getting hard in a jar.

Used the random yeast that came with the IPA and dropped in a US-05 (had).

Mixed it all up in the FV, took the OG and just had a quick look at the numbers since there was plenty of bobbles in the hydrometer. Went into a slight panic – I haven’t put enough sugar in! – as I read, under, 1035, forgot all about the bobbles and didn’t double check the reading.

Heated up a drop of water, mixed in some white sugar to dump into the FV. As I was pouring in the sweet stuff, it hit me – let the hydrometer rest a bit before reading…

So final reading came to 1060, so lets see how it brews away. Hopefully the temp will drop some more over night, as I pitched it a 21-22C.

It was happy bobbling away at 17.5-18c for a week, when I dry hopped with 30g Saaz, left over from another brew. The last few days the temp started to crawl close to 19c, so no more brewing this side of summer.

After 2 weeks in the FV I took the FG and it came out at 1007. That should give a end result over 7.3-7.5%, which is rather more than the 5.6-5.8% I was aiming for. The very little sample I tried it taste not much different to the other IPA’s I have done, but there is a hit of alcohol. Let’s see how strong that is when it have had three or four weeks in the bottles.

Managed to squeeze out 42 bottles, so a total cost of £0.75 per 500ml bottles. Not bad at all.