Last November, I switched from 12 0z. crown cap bottles to liter and half-liter swing tops. Instead of laboriously processing around 50-plus crown cap bottles, I fill and close either 18 liter bottles or 36 half-liters.

That’s the good part. The bad part is carbonation! All our bottling instructions call for a certain amount of priming sugar. Problem is, that quantity of sugar is based on the relative proportion of beer and headspace in a 12-oz. bottle. When you go to larger bottles, it all changes!

I’ve had liter bottles blow the entire swing-top bail assembly clear up to the ceiling, followed by half the beer in the bottle shooting 3 feet in the air! If it doesn’t gusher, pouring produces a glass full of foam. Not the desired result.

To make it worse, no one in any of the forums has offered anything resembling useful advice. I’ve received sage advice about the volume of CO2 produced versus the volume of headspace and how this affects carbonation. Others feel that the standard half cup of sugar for 5 gallons applies in all cases. Some folks advise conditioning for at least 2 months. I’m not that patient.

Finally, I remembered my friend Jeff who has always used liter swing-tops and has won competitions with his home brews. His advice? For liter bottles,no priming sugar at all! And normal headspace (i.e., just the neck). With a liter of beer, the fermentation of the residual sugars in the bottle produce enough CO2 to produce adequate carbonation.

I plant follow this in my next bottling. I’ll report back on the results.

I’ve doing a lot of reading about the desirability of a full boil for extract brewing. The idea of having the sugar concentrations the same as you’d have with a grain-mash wort was persuasive. Today, I decided to give it a shot. Some observations:

• The extracts (LME and DME) seemed to dissolve more readily. LME tends to settle on the bottom of the brewpot and needs a lot of stirring to avoid scorching. With the larger volume of water, it felt like I did a lot less of it. at the end, much less scorching.
• 6 gallons of wort takes a long time to come to a boil. “Have a home-brew?” I had three!
• Once it starts to foam you have to be fast to avoid a boilover. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. Thankfully, concrete is eminently washable. The propane burner is, sadly, really ugly.
• 6 gallons of boiling wort is something you don’t want to carry in from the patio. Luckily, I had purchased long hoses for my immersion chiller.
• 6 gallons of wort also takes a long time to cool.

We’ll see in a few weeks whether the extra work was worth it.

P.S. Never again will I skip the hop bags. I’d forgotten how much of a pain massive trub can be.

Just went down to the brew shop to check on the yeast starter I put up late Sunday afternoon and found a lovely layer of apparently dead yeast on the bottom of the flask. So much for brewing tomorrow.

I’m beginning to question my decision to switch over to liquid yeast cultures. This is the second liquid culture I’ve had fizzle on me. I’ve put in a good bit of wasted effort and now my planned Thursday brew day is shot to hell. It’s either drive down to The Green Growler in Croton and get another vial of yeast culture, put up another starter and wait 3 days — or just give up and pitch a packet of old, reliable Safeale #US-05.

Scheduling brew days isn’t easy. Even though I’m a work-from-home IT consultant, there are enough client meetings, deadlines and dates with friends that finding the better part of a day to do my brewing can be a chore. Having to plan 3 or 4 days in advance can really be a pain. And then to have the bloody yeast die on me? It’s more than an Old Bunny can stand!

With dry yeast, it’s “Hey, my afternoon meeting got cancelled! Let’s brew!”

I may just go back to dry yeast for my basic ales (English Brown, ESB, American IPA and the like), which are what I best like to brew and drink, and save the liquid yeast for the fancy stuff like Belgians and Imperials.

To the Old Bunny Brewing web site and blog. I’ve been homebrewing, on and off, for around 10 years. The latest “on” phase goes back about 2 years when my friend Joe Fisher of Man Skirt Brewing inspired me to get back into the “business”.

Since then, I’ve brewed over a dozen batches of beer and converted a storage room off the garage into my brew shop, complete with utility sink and ventilation. My eventual goal is to switch from propane to electricity for my brewpot and move the entire operation indoors.

So far, the time constraints imposed by work have limited me to extract brewing but, now that I’m semi-retired, I hope to get into all-grain brewing once the weather warms up.

Besides homebrewing, I expect I’ll be blogging some about the greater world of beer. There’s a lot going on — stuff that I really like and other stuff that I really don’t — and I tend to be rather outspoken about both. Also, there’s a lot of great beer being brewed here in the Hudson Valley and I’ll be writing about that from time to time.

In the mean time , “Relax! Have a homebrew!”