Light Ale - Brewing and Bottling

I brewed the Light Ale kit from www.morebeer.com last weekend. Brewing went just fine, it was something like 6 lbs. of ultralight liquid malt extract, and about a half a pound of Crystal 40L as adjunct grains. Only 0.5 oz. of Glacier (6% AA) hops were used for the boil and 1 oz. of Glacier (4.6% AA) were used for aroma so it shouldn't be very hoppy. (Indeed, it isn't, as I'll mention in the bottling part of this post.) I used Nottingham Ale dry yeast as I needed this to brew in about a week.

I then bottled it this weekend, however, I had a bit of a devilish idea as you can see below.


That's right, there's a serrano pepper in that beer. There's 13 more just like it. It's going to be quite the beer as the peppers are pretty darn hot. I steamed the peppers very briefly to try to help sanitize them and just that little time in the steam they already began to exude an intense aroma of capsaicin. I was wearing gloves the whole time while handling them (I'm not afraid of peppers, it's just part of my sanitation procedure) and figured I didn't get any residue on my hands. Well, I must have touched some residue and scratched my face at some point b/c the whole left of my face is burning a little right now.

Anyhoo, peppers aside, the beer tastes just fine (as well as a beer fresh out of the fermenter can taste) and weighs in at about 4.5% ABV. I'm really looking forward to cracking open one of those pepper beers. How apropo that I bottled this on cinco de mayo. I should call it Ale Caramba, or maybe Cinco de Mayi-yi-yi-o, I don't know.