the breakfast beer sounds awesome. hopefully it turns out like some delicious oatmeal with fruit topping.

I don't think it's ever going to stop fermenting. Steady slow bubbling for 9 days now. I've never had one go this long.

Bottling the smoked prter now. 6.8% ABV is the final tally.

Awesome. How did you do the smoked flavor?

I am hoping to bottle a pilsner I made for wifewilleatyou tonight. The basement has a cold spot where they used to shovel in the coal. I'll try to set it all back in there and it should be ready to drink in 7-8 more weeks. Already on week 5. I shot for something a combination of New Glarus Two Women and Stella. This is all "lagering" at nearly ale temps though. Hope it turns out, lots of waiting if it don't. 3 weeks ago I moved it to secondary and it was already delicious..and in my experience they don't get worse. Knock on wood.

I used half a pound of peat smoked malt in the mix. I strongly suspect I will want to use more next time, as I can barely smell it now. Who knows, maybe it will pop out after conditioning, but when I opened the grain ziplock bag pre-mash, it smelled GOOD. Like scotch. Very muted after fermentation.

Racked the scotch ale from Sunday into a secondary, too. It's up to 6.25% ABV so far and has another 2 to go, maybe 3, I think. Smells and tastes REALLY good so far. Looks like solid caramel. Nice sharp bite to it from the longer boil and bittering hops, without being too much. Seems like it's on the Scoth Ale side of the line (vs Barley Wine). Can't wait.

Did you get it done?

I am finding I need more vessels (swingtop bottles, growlers). I need to get my pipeline KICKING or I'll keep running out / drinking shit too early. I need to bank a lot of beer this next month... porter is bottled, scotch is still bubbling, stout is bottled and rinkable but it's a tiny batch and it needs TIME so I haaaave to stop sneaking one every ther night. I need to brew, but to do that I need more bottles and growlers.

Yes! It was a success. All of my bottle washing and sanitizing and bottling and cleanup in 2 hours. Record time for me...and from what I've read I'm overdoing on the bottles.

My pipeline is doing well..but I have plans to give a lot away around the holidays..
probably about 90 or so 12 oz bottles, 20ish grolsh 16 ozers, 30ish 22 oz bombers, and few odds and ends.
I don't have any growlers that I could bottle condition in, should look into it but they so spendy.

If I have time tonight I'll do an official inventory count.

I haven't had a drinking buddy for about 9 months though...and I only have one batch fermenting right now. Resisting the urge to brew because our baby's due date was yesterday. I KNOW that being halfway through a brewday would send my wife into labor...which I want, I just don't want to toss a half brewed batch.

Oh there's no doubt she'd kick into labor during the mash. No fucking doubt.

"PINCH IT OFF HON - I HAVE 30 MINS LEFT!"

If we make it past turkey day I'm going to the brew that thing out.

So your bottling routine... I am curious. Mine:

1. Grab a 5 oz bag of corn sugar, put in a small pot with an inch or so of water, boil, turn off.
2. Eyeball the fermentor and estimate volume to know how many bottles needed. I'm getting fast / accurate at this part. Pull those bottles / growlers out, stage them by the sink.
3. Fill the bottling bucket with a splash of iodine sanitizer, fill with cool water, add the tubing and hoses.
4. Swingtops I submerge entirely in the bucket for a few minutes so the entire cap assembly gets clean. Usually chuck 6 or 8 in there at once, pull them all out, reload. Brown bottles I plunge in and fill momentarily.
5. ALL bottles as I pull them out get swizzled and dumped, leaving only about an inch of sanitizer in the bottom. I then stage them in rows on the counter. I have a theory here: the bottom of the bottle is where everything falls and lands, where everything remains. Where any leftovers would've dried and potentially formed any funk. The bottom of the bottle is Microbial Grand Central, and the sides of the bottle are Muncie Indiana. So they all get 100% submerged, but for staging I only leave an inch in there. That means I don't have to refill the bottling bucket a second time.
6. Once all bottles are cleaned and staged, I dump out the bottling bucket and get all the hoses and tubing attached and ready.
7. I pour the (now cooled) priming sugar water in, and begin siphoning in the beer from the fermentor. As I do, every few minutes I use the end of the siphoning hose to stir the beer so the sugar gets evenly distributed.
8. Once it's transferred, I grab 6 or 8 bottles at a time, put them on the kitchen floor (with a rag handy), and begin filling. Swingtops rule here - I fill maybe 4 or 5 brown bottles each batch just on the chance I want to give some away. Otherwise, none except 22ozers as a last resort. Growlers and grolsch swingtops.
9. Once it runs out, I tear thin strips of blue painters tape off and attach to all bottles, then grab a fine point sharpy and label. Toss them all into the back of the closet, make notes in the brew notebook, and clean up.

First Mate went 10 days long.

Be afraid... be very afraid.

Also, I'm suspicious that one of my bottled batches is infected. Which would take me down about 30 bottles. First time it's happened to me.

I keep looking over all my information. There's sooo many places it could have gone bad I just don't know.

This is that RyePA "Rye so dark?" batch I mentioned earlier..where I reused the yeast.

I'm suspicious that either the yeast went wild or that it stalled because the reused yeast was not healthy enough? It started at 1.062... I wrote down that I got an FG reading of 1.010 but to be honest I was super buzzed that night and maybe just seeing things in a positive light...
I don't even really recall taking the reading.

It could also be that I was reusing bottles I got off craigslist that maybe have some perma funk in them that I didn't clean well enough.

Too many factors it could have been, I will never bottle after a brewday again.

It doesn't seem to affect all bottles, but I've had 2 out of 7 now that were revoltingly sweet.
The 2 bad ones: maybe sweet isn't the right word... but it's like if you you have a bunch of children's tylenol in your mouth and then some rye undertones. Kind of sweet. Ridiculously carbonated.
The 5 better ones: Perfectly carbonated. Have a tinge of plastic? taste/aroma but it's almost like I wouldn't notice it if I hadn't had the 2 bad ones... I could almost attribute any off taste to my imagination, because it still has a complex delicious rye taste. The deliciousness is not there at all in those bad ones. Now I'm so suspicious of it my tongue is freaking out.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

If it varies by bottle then I suspect it is NOT the yeast you re-used.

1. Eye fermentor. Eye emptys. Guess at the number of bottles I need and add three bottles to the guess.
2. Put all bottles into the bathtub. Put a drop of seriously watered down dr bronners soap in each bottle and fill each bottle up.
3. Use bottle scrubber on inside of two bottles... and then use the bottle blaster hooked up to the tub and I rinse each out twice with blasting hot water.
4. Use vinator for sanitization. Dip the tip of the bottle in the basin and then 2 squirts up into the bottle. I put the bottle back into the cardboard boxes upside down. The idea is that the sanitizer will drip downward protecting it from any shit that's on the box... and my boxes slowly deteriorate. I plan to make wooden crate boxes specifically for putting bottles upside down. Those plastic bottle trees are just too fucking ugly for me.
5. Put approx 3/4cup of cane sugar in 16 oz of water. Bring to a boil. Meanwhile, I sanitize my bucket, racking cane, bottling cane. I usually make a 5 gallon batch of star san in the bottling bucket and siphon some off ... and have some go out the bottling cane into another bucket. I will keep that sanitizer around for re-use on a brew day or two.
6. put priming solution and beer together
7. 1 bottle at a time. Put cap on capper while I'm filling it. Cap as soon as it's full. Set bottling cane on sanitized cake pan while capping. Repeat.
8. Start PBW hot soak that carboy.
9. Write number on all the caps... store all the bottles.
10. Finish cleaning up.

That's what I was thinking too. I'm just thrown off by the sweet, but like I said "sweet" might be the wrong word. I wouldn't describe it as sweet like candy or sugar.

Chlorophenol?
http://morebeer.com/content/homebrew-off-flavors

That would make sense. Being all drunk washing the bottles all shittily... I know I have chlorine in my water. Use campden tabs when I brew but not when I rinse stuff.

As for your bottling routine, yeah that looks like it may be "too much." I don't need to wash mine much, because when we drink them we rinse them right away. There's no solids or dired up anything in them, so a quick soak in iodine sanitizer gets them rhett-to-go. So much quicker.

I rinse and scrub them after I drink from them too. I really overdo it. Super paranoid. Need to let go.

If you have healthy yeast (and lots of them), and you wash the bottles after you drink them, AND you sanitize right before you fill, you're really stacking the odds in the yeasts' favor pretty damned heavily. I sanitize the bottle caps too, fwiw, but really the double wash thing you're doing is probably uber-overkill.

On the other hand, I would be mildly suspicious about those cardboard storage boxes. Yes, microbes tend to fall so storing the bottles upside down is incredibly good, but having moist cardboard around the lips of the bottles is not great. Moist cardboard is a great place to throw a microbe party. All kinds of industrial glues, binders, dyes, and other oddball chemicals in there, which when wetted can turn into something bacteria can work with. Mine get stored in boxes, but only after they've dried for days out on the counter, and rightside up.

My 2 cents.

Hmm. That's a good enough argument for me to never do that again.

I donno what options it leaves you with, but hopefully something that isn't a pain in the dick.

There's quite a few things I'm realizing I need to reevaluate, it's just hard to change what's been working.

I will just leave them upright and it'll be fine. A few drops won't do anything but help. I just need to repeat that to myself over and over.
I've even heard that in demos of their product they'll drink a whole pint of properly diluted solution...just to prove how safe and tasteless it is.

Part of my issue is that I received most of my pointers from a dude that brewed 15 years ago and cleaned everything with bleach.

Oh fuck that shit.

I work around microbiologists and clean rooms, and it's helped me figure out what I actually should be worrying about. For example, I never lean over an open container of wort unless it's up near boiling temps. Your body (especially your head and face) rain microbes. I barely even put my hand over the opening, though hands that've been cleaning bottles in solution are pretty clean. But no face and hair falling down into that batch once it's cooling.

It's allll about odds. You just need the odds strongly in favor of yeast, and not for bacteria. Anything else is over prep, or bad luck.