Beer Making Day Twelve

So today I went skiing, the snow sucks. It is old, icy and is almost gone. It was warm too- a balmy 38f at the pass. I was pretty excited to return home and get my bottles ready for the final stage of my beer making process.

I had about 24 bottles but calculated that I needed about 48, assuming some loss of wort. So I ventured down the alley to see if any of my neighbors were drinking beer these days- most seem to be drinking wine. I was hoping to get basically the same style of bottle- long necks. My reasoning is they will stack better, probably not true, but I was also hoping to have a consistent look about these bottles.

Fortunately, several of my neighbors do drink beer, and they had the right kind of bottles. I am still a little short, but this will have to do, otherwise I am going to go buy some. The only think left was to get the labels off the bottles.

Soaking them doesn't seem to work by it self, so I put the bottles in by boiling pan and brought the bottles to the boiling point. The labels pretty much fell off as you can see from the picture!

I then just wiped glue off with a dish rag- the bottles where still hot while doing this, so you need to have tough hands or hold onto the bottle with something that insulates your hands a bit. For a few, I had to use a green scouring pad to get the glue off, but that didn't cause much extra work on my part, just a different medium.

The wort still seems to be active so I am going to wait another day or two. Hopefully I will find a few more bottles.