A hydrometer check today shows that my beer’s gravity is 17 today (Thursday), down from 20 on Tuesday. My final target is a gravity in the range of 8 to 12, so at this rate it might be next week before I’m ready to bottle.

Bottling a beer whose gravity isn’t sufficiently lowered can be very dangerous. Since gravity is largely a measure of how much sugar is still in the beer, bottling a beer with a high gravity (and adding additional sugar for carbonation) can mean that too much sugar makes it into the bottles. When the yeast begin to convert that sugar, and the sugar has nowhere to go, the pressure of the newly made carbon dioxide can get high enough to explode bottles. Exploding bottles are generally considered double-plus ungood.

Given that I’ve got at least four or five days to wait until the beer is ready to bottle, I’ve begun to consider involving a secondary fermenter in my brewing process (my impatience forces me to act!). The purpose of a secondary fermenter is discussed in my previous posts. To get a list of my other beer-related posts, click here.