Bottling!

Those bottles don't look like
brand-name bourbons at all!

It's been 12 weeks, and it's finally time to get that lovely, lonely bourbon out of its dark, smoky barrel and into a bottle so that it can get into a glass and then into my belly!

After priming the barrel, cleaning it out, prepping it, choosing the right starter, sampling week to week, and the dreaded waiting, I figured bottling the bourbon would be the easy step. I was wrong in two separate ways.

1. I needed something in which to store the newly-aged beverage. The moonshine jars would work, but they lacked something bottle-y, in the sense that they're large mason jars, not bottles. Fortunately, I'd had the foresight to finish off a couple of bottles of other bourbon, and rinsed out and saved those bottles. Challenge #1, overcome.
2. The spout of the barrel is pretty close to the counter top. For tastings, I would place the barrel near the edge of the counter, with the spigot out over the floor. Then, I could put my tasting glass underneath, and pour. This could work for bottling, I suppose, but I didn't trust the flow to be laminar enough over the course of the four foot drop to the floor. I could stand there and hold the bottle, but who has time for that?

To solve Challenge #2, I cleaned off the bottom shelf of one of the cabinets over the counter. The taller of my two bottles was the perfect height to catch the bourbon. For the shorter of the two, I stacked the plates I'd removed from the cabinet to make up the height. With our 4oz funnel and a basket coffee filter to catch any sediment, we were good to bottle!

As you can see from the picture, we filled about a bottle and a half. So, 1.5L of moonshine + .375L H2O + 12 weeks = approximately 1.125L of bourbon. Not a bad yield, if I do say so myself, taking into account that I sampled a few mL each week. One thing I'm slightly embarrassed by is the fact that I added only 375mL of water, even though I knew I was adding 1.5L moonshine, and that the barrel holds 2L. 1.5 + .375 is not 2. I worry that there was some evaporation because I left space in the top of the barrel. More than that, though, I worry about the wood near the top drying out, and having to re-prime it. I guess that's not terribly dangerous, as long as the barrel stays upright, right?

Back to the bourbon. It looks like bourbon, if a little light. It smells like bourbon, if a little, well, light. It tastes...not quite, but almost like bourbon. Close enough to mix with maple syrup and lemon and drink with a good steak. It doesn't quite compare with the bottle of Eagle Rare or Knob Creek that I'd finished recently, but when starting from moonshine and aging for just 12 weeks (or approximately 1/39th the length of Knob Creek), that is probably to be expected. I think that I will be using already-aged, but cheap, bourbon in the future, and trying to increase its quality through increased aging in my barrel. We've seen the moonshine mellow and morph, so why not a cheap bourbon. Jim Beam might become drinkable!

One other thought: I am not a big drinker. Well, I mean, I'm a big guy, and I drink, but I'm not a lush. I probably will not go through this batch of bourbon in the next three months, nor the fairly new bottle of Knob Creek in the liquor cabinet. Which means that when my next batch is bottled, I'll still have some of the old batch. It might be time then to figure out something else to age in the barrel. Maybe some vodka? Or some wine? Mead? Who knows? There are options, and I have three months to figure it out. For now, more bourbon!

Next up: More bourbon! With flavors!