The Waiting Game: A Priming Sugar Mishap
What’s the worst part of homebrewing? No, it’s not the cleaning and sanitizing of equipment. It’s the wait once your bottles have been filled with your craft liquid gold.
The Inspired Paso Ale was bottled on July 5th, but due to a small oversight on my part, I forgot to add priming sugar to the bottles — realizing this only when I had about 2 gallons of beer remaining in the bottling bucket. I calculated the priming sugar amount for the remaining batch and added it in. For the bottles already capped, it took about 5 days before I realized I could prime them individually. After running the calculations on a per-bottle basis, I added about 5.5 ml of priming sugar to each of those bottles. The entire batch was noted and set aside to condition.
Now, I usually don’t cheat and open a bottle before posting my First Sip video on YouTube. There’s a real sense of excitement and anticipation in cracking that first bottle — the aroma, the taste, the finish. It’s something special to know you crafted the beer in your pint glass. This time, though, I opened 5 bottles, and I’ll admit I was frustrated with the results, to some degree. I won’t get into that frustration today, but I’ll share my full thoughts on the Inspired Paso Ale when the video drops.
I’m excited to have two local brewers from Cal Coast Beer Company — head brewer Frank Panian and Blake Irysh — weigh in with their feedback on the overall package of this beer. There are some positives here; it’s not completely undrinkable. But I do know there were issues, not just on brew day but potentially with the packaging as well, which is what I’m sorting through now.
Give it two more days and the First Sip video will be live, along with Tasting Notes from JC, once I’m able to get his beer up to him in the Bay Area from Paso.
Cheers.