Bottling and Brewing

So I got the Vanilla Bourbon Porter in bottles over the on Sunday and got to scheming on what to brew next.  I ended up with about 4 gallons total for the Porter, and now the next 3 months will determine how the flavor comes out.  One thing I noticed right away from my test before bottling is that oak has a very prominent part in the flavor right now.  Not surprising as I left the oak in for 6 or 7 days and beer is really sensitive to flavors like oak.  I'm hopping in time the vanilla and smokey malt flavor will come out a little more, but it felt like a porter to my tongue and I didn't get any off flavors so I may have just managed to not ruin the beer in spite of my best efforts.  With so much sugar still left in the beer I added less than 3/4 cup for priming, and I'm still concerned I'll end up with bottle bombs.  To counter this I put a large part of this batch into swingtop style 16oz bottles, but come time to drink it I may regret putting such a big in your face beer into 16oz bottles.

Anyhow here is a link to the Vanilla Bourbon Porter for those that are ever interested in getting into this.

I get the bottling done relatively early so I headed off to the Homebrew store to see what trouble I could get into for Labor Day.  Trouble indeed I did try to get into, the owner was at the store and he had a stainless false bottom that he said he would give me at 50% off and would charge me nominally for installing a ball lock on my keggle.  I came back the next day and much to my dismay that false bottom just doesn't fit, and no amount of wishing is going to fix that.  I probably will still get the ball lock and a mesh screen installed and end up buying another keg to convert so I can have a keggle and mash turn.