It was actually easy once I had everything I needed. We saved bottles as we drank Belgians, and then I bought a case of 12 to round it out. A full 5-gallon carboy fit into about 25 750ml bottles.

After unsuccessfully trying to beg or borrow a corker I caved and picked up a Portuguese Floor Corker at Maine Brewing Supply ($72 later, ouch!). I bought a package of reference corks for Belgian bottles and a bag of twist cages to hold the pressure.

According to ProMash I needed 6.3 oz of priming sugar to get 3.25 volumes of CO2 in the conditioned beer. Because the carboy had sat at cold temperatures (42 deg) for nearly five months I felt like it would be wise to re-pitch fresh yeast, so I rehydrated 2/3 package of Safbrew T-58 and pitched it into the bottling bucket. I had read that T-58 is well known for forming a solid sediment after conditioning is complete – we’ll see how that turns out.

The bottles are currently stored on their side in my living room and the heat is locked at 66 degrees. It usually goes down to 58 in the daytime to save money on oil – oh the things we do for beer!

Tasting notes to follow someday…though I will open one in a couple of weeks, I am hoping this one will be good to put up for a while.

If I can get all the tile installed that I have to do this week I might finally get around to bottling. But it means I’ll have to come to grips with dumping both cases of Framboise that went cardboard on me. I guess I have to finally accept it.