test bottle -- barleywine

i've siphoned off a 22 oz bottle of the barleywine, adding about a teaspoon of brown sugar. from what i'm reading i may have to put some yeast in when real bottling time comes around. the stuff is still at around 1.030, tastes pretty hot, but also on the sweet side. i think bottling yeast will help trim off some of the extra sweetness. i'll check on the test bottle in 2 weeks or so to see how it tastes before deciding to pitch.

i've harvested the yeast from the primary (lots of trub) of the scottish 80 to see what i can do with it. so far it looks like it's not super-live.

scottish 80 #2 bottling day

bottled up the scottish 80, attempt #2 4oz brown sugar in 2 cups of water, boiled and cooled. got about 550 oz out of this (~4.3 gallons). 1.015 fg. tastes a little sour and bitter. smelled like bread when i popped the top, then smelled like fruit. i'm not sure about this, left it in the primary for 5 weeks(?), trying to avoid bottle bombs. i also brushed out all the bottles with star san, rinsed, dried, then sanitized. i even cleaned the bottle trees. trying to eliminate any opportunistic bacteria or yeast since the last couple of batches have been a little off (last export 80 was a bunch of geysers). i'm going to test the first one on the 10th and then wait until the 13th if it's not ready. the last bad batch burnt my morale, so i hope this goes better.