Hombrew Results

I'm sad to say that this post is more than a month overdue.  Time and events have conspired to keep me from updating the blog for the last month or so, and so the end result of the homebrew experiment has gone unreported.

First off, I'm happy to say that it was a success.  We cracked open the first bottle in early April and noticed right off the bat that it was a mighty good beer!  It turned out a nice dark amber color and had a good full body and produces a good head when poured.  As to taste, well, I don't know how to describe it.  It's akin to Blue Moon Ale, but with a maltier flavor.  And that's the best I can do.  My palate is apparently not sensitive enough to discern if it has undertones of citrus, vanilla, and all that other fun jazz that you read on the side of commercially bought beer.  But, you can definitely taste the roasted grains and that nice malt flavor that they give.

The beer also has an incredible amount of sediment in it.  I've discovered that you have to do an incredibly slow pour to get the beer from the bottle to the glass without ending up with all the sediment being mixed in with the beer.  I'm not sure if this is just a side effect of brewing with all grain or if it just ended up this way with this particular batch because of some oddball environmental factor.  Regardless, a nice slow pour alleviates the problem and keeps the beer clear.

We only had one mishap during the drinking stage and that was having one bottle of beer explode.  And of course it had to be one of the big bottles.  I'm trying to decide upon a method to bottle future batches.  I would like to switch to a bottle that has a self sealing cap that locks into place.  It would alleviate the issue of using a butterfly capper, save money in the long run (very long run, actually) on bottle caps and save me a sterilization step during bottling.  So, to see if the bottles were worth it, I bought two 1 liter bottles with this type of lid to give it a try - individual 12 ounce bottles being too expensive to buy all at once.  Well, the bottles work great, except it was one of these that exploded.  We kept the beer in the upstairs closet to condition and my best guess is that it got too warm in the closet and caused one of the bottles to over carbonate.  Thankfully the bottle happened to explode right next to our stock of toilet paper and that managed to soak up a good amount of the beer.  Our down comforter soaked up the rest...

Lesson learned.  Next time I'll let the beer condition someplace cooler and then chill it down to hopefully kill the yeast.

As good as this batch is, though, I'm starting to prepare for my next batch for two reasons: first, I've got the itch now and I want to keep brewing and experimenting, and second, I'm down to eight bottles of the first batch.  I think with this next batch I'm going to try a flavored beer of some sort with, but I'm torn between two options.  The first being a mixture of vanilla and grains of paradise as flavoring and the second being a cherry flavoring.  I have all the necessary ingredients to do either one, it's just a matter of making a decision.

(Sorry that there's no pictures of the completed project.  As I'm writing this on a Sunday afternoon and we have church in approximately an hour and a half, I didn't think it was the most opportune time to crack one open.  I'll try to get some pics in the next couple days and post them so you can see the final product.)