We bottled our experimental saison mini-batches last night.  Other than almost forgetting the priming sugar, and needing to sterilize a few extra 12 oz. bottles when our 25 oz. bottles were too big for our caps, everything went pretty well.  We had five 1-gallon growlers with different yeast strains, and we didn’t want to cross-contaminate.  So we sterilized our tubing and bottling tip between each batch.  That was time-consuming at first, but we got better with practice.

We started by taking gravity readings of each batch.  Three of the batches (the plain saison yeast, Brett. Bruxellensis and Bret. Lambicus) were all right around the target gravity (1.014).  But the Brett. Claussenii and Belgian Sour Mix batches weren’t quite done (1.018 and 1.020).  But we were done waiting (and they were done bubbling), so we bottled them anyway. We tasted the gravity samples for each batch, and there were definite differences between them.  The plain saison was very dry.  The Brett. batches all had some funkiness to them, though it was hard to tell them apart.

Then we siphoned them straight into a racking tip.  There was a little more loss than with a single big batch, but we wound up with around 4 gallons bottled (6x 22 oz. and 32x 12 oz.).  And it was definitely more bother than doing a single large batch.  But I think it’s worth it for the chance to try a ton of options all at once.