Learning experiences

This week has been a crazy learning experience when it comes to brewing.  We decided to bottle our Cherry Wheat in the same week that we transferred our stout to the secondary.  We ran into a number of problems with both.

Apparently chopped up fruit is small enough to get into the siphoning tube.  It's also small enough to get through the bottling wand.  Anyone seeing the problem yet?  It's not terribly bad, only a few pieces made it into the bottles.  Still, we like to keep thing light hearted, so we've named it the Chewy Cherry Wheat.  The advice we've been given is to put a nylon bag over the end of the siphon in the future so stuff can't get into the bottling bucket.

And the stout... it hasn't finished fermenting properly.  Our Munton's yeast apparently comes in a smaller quantity than other dry yeast packets, and has a tendency to give out early on fermentation.  Consequently, we had a beer that stopped fermenting while it was still only at about 2.6% alcohol.  So aside from spending way too much time reading everything I could find on yeast, we got some Nottingham yeast and yeast nutrient from our local home brew store, How Do You Brew?  It looks like it did some more fermentation after adding the additional yeast and nutrient, although we won't be able to check for a while to see if it's gotten anywhere close to where we need it to be.  I guess in the future we'll know to either use 2 packets of their yeast or make a starter first to build up the cell count.