Rocky Raccoon's Crystal Honey Lager - Part 3

Rocky Raccoon's Crystal Honey Lager

A variation of a Lager from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing
O.G.:  1.084
F.G.:  1.000
Estimated ABV: ~11.13%

Buster soon after his sabotage attempt

I can barely contain my excitement at the potential of this batch - tasting it tonight and revealed several similarities to the We're In The Garden Belgian White brewed about this time last year. We'll see what happens while it bottle conditions, but I have high hopes for the Rocky Raccoon. The tasting also confirms the high alcohol content indicated by the OG and FG readings. I drank the leftovers from the sample taken to read the FG and had a definitely felt the alcohol's effect after a few minutes.

Tonight I was flying solo while bottling, though Ramius was there to provide his own form of help - mostly sniffing each bottle before I could cap it. The bottling process took about 2 hours total and I was able to get a yield of 45 bottles (~4.22 gallons). The only difficulties in the bottling process were my folks' cat knocking my siphoning equipment onto the kitchen floor, causing me to have to re-sterilize it, and the heather tips blocking up the final siphoning of the beer into the bottle. The auto-siphon was able to filter out quite a bit of the heather, but some of the smaller particles found their way through it and into the beer. I don't anticipate it adding anything but a more robust heather flavoring - a flavor that is naturally subtle and was added to this mild brew so that its character could be featured.

Prepping for the bottling process with bottles provided by David Collins