The day has finally arrived! Our homemade beer has been brewed, fermented, and bottled. We've survived two weeks of anxious anticipation without a single bottle exploding. A few days ago, we put a couple of bottles in the fridge to cool and tasted our very first homebrew a few hours later!
The verdict: decent, definitely decent! It's very sweet and malty and with almost no discernible hops. Fairly one-dimensional, but this is about what we'd expected from a kit brew. We liked the level of carbonation and even got a thin, but definite, head on the beer.
It's definitely not the best beer we've ever tasted, but it's good enough to drink and good enough to make us excited to brew some more!
An interesting side note: we gave in to our eagerness and actually tasted one of the beers a few days before we technically should have. We figured it would just be less carbonated than if we'd let it sit longer, but would still taste the same. But it was awful. Not spit-it-out awful, but awful enough that we eyed the other 50 bottles with a little fear in our hearts.
Two days later, some friends visited and insisted on trying the beer despite our protests. They took a few sips and pronounced it good! We tried some ourselves in disbelief, and lo and behold, the beer had actually improved in those two extra days. Instead of tasting like beer-y soda, it actually taste like real beer.
The moral of the story is that you can't rush beer or judge it too quickly, and we've learned our lesson. Onward we go!
What kind of beer should we try brewing next?
Related: The Real Truth About Skunked Beer
(Images: Emma Christensen)
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Try this American IPA kit from Williams Brewing. I just recently started brewing and this is the first kit we started with. We are now almost finished with the keg (skipped bottling). The malt extra is not prehopped, so you pitch hop pellets throughout the brew. Very easy, greaty floral hop taste. Might be a nice change from you last brew. Next up, one more kit, then on to full grain brews.
second vote for an IPA. I will be bottling mine one day this week. :-)
let that beer sit for another week and see what changes, you should have better carbonation/head retention.
Congrats! It's a great hobby. The more you wait on the bottles, the better. Bottle conditioning takes some time. Even if I like a beer when I debut it, I undoubtedly end up liking it more two weeks after first opening up a batch.
If you can get a nice Oktoberfest kit that you don't have to lager, I recommend that. The one I'm drinking now is spectacular. I agree with other commenters who recommend IPA homebrews. Hoppy beers really lend themselves well to homebrewing.
Best of luck! You'll find that you can get as good or better quality beer for a low price by brewing it at home, while learning a cool hobby.
Congratulations on your successful homebrew venture! We've been brewing beer (three to six cases at a time) on a regular basis for nearly 10 years - it costs so much less than storebought and tastes great. It definitely improves with age (and 'green' beer can actually make you kinda sick if it's really rough). We always let ours sit a bare minimum of three weeks, and it tastes much better after a couple of months. Even better a couple of months after that! :)