Furious Clone in the bottle and some tips

I was able to bottle the furious clone on Saturday.  It took about 2 hrs as I had to clean and sanitize a bunch of bottles and I had to remove the labels on about 50% of them.  Bottling went smooth and fairly quick.  I ended up with 12 22oz bottles and 25 12oz bottles.  Now it is just two weeks and I can drink it!  I cannot wait and I will update this post with the tasting.

A helpful tip for the fellow brewer, I bought a 18 gallon HDPE tub on a whim at home depot for $6 thinking that I could use it to store equipment and such, and it has really come in handy.  It came in handy on brew day, but where it really shines is bottling.  I put about 5 gallons of warm water in it and also added some one step cleaner.  The labels and most of the glue came right off of the bottles.  This made it so easy to clean them up, just a wipe with a clean scrub sponge and the glue was totally gone.  I rinsed the bottles with a bottle jet prior to putting them in the one step.  After the bottles were cleaned, I emptied the tub, put the now cleaned bottles back in it and poured in 10 gallons of water and 2 oz of star-san over the bottles.  I know that I just could have used them after the one-step as that is a sanitizer as well, but due to the amount of glue that was most likely dissolved I decided to rinse the bottles again with the bottle jet and then use the star-san.  While it was probably overkill I just didn't want to lose my first batch to infection. 

On another note, I have saved up some money and I am now focused on brewing my second batch of cream ale and then ditching the extract brewing in favor of all grain.  I am going to go the cooler route and I am going to purchase the round 10gallon Rubbermaid cooler.  I am debating if I should just bite the bullet and get a sparge arm, but I don't have a hot liquor tank and I think that I am just going to start with the batch sparge or fly sparge and see how it goes.  Expect much more on this as the parts are purchased.  I cannot wait to relax and have a homebrew!!!