Tonight I finally go around to bottling this year’s Doppelbock. I didn’t get to brew it until rather late. But what’s more important is that I started a repeat of the Doppelbock flavor and yeast experiment. Three 12 oz bottles were dosed with about 0.5 loose WLP 830 slurry. I estimate that this amounts to about 1-2 Billion cells. Three bottles are kept as control. In addition to that I purged the head space of 4 additional bottles with O2. Two of these O2 bottles also got 0.5 ml yeast sediment. The idea is that if the desired Doppelbock flavor is caused by oxidation, it should appear sooner in the bottled with O2 but no yeast.

Now I have to wait. I think I’ll crack the first bottles in about 3 months. The beer tastes good now. It’s clean and higher alcohols are low. But it is still missing this deep “dark malt” flavor.

I encurage others to try a similar experiment when bottling a beer, that’s to be aged, from a keg.