38 bottles of beer

This afternoon we bottled the beer that we brewed two weeks ago, a Scotch ale. A taste test was conducted (of course) and the beer is quite drinkable already. The previous two brews haven't tasted all that great prior to bottle conditioning. They improved a lot with age, and so we have high hopes for this beer.

We also tested the final gravity and with this and the original gravity reading (taken before fermenting), we determined that the beer has an alcohol content of 6.1%. Not too bad!

We ended up with 38 bottles: 10 tallies (750ml) and 28 regular size bottles (330ml).

Scotch Ale

It's hard to balance an interest in triathlon training with an interest in beer, which is why it's been a while since we last did a home brew. However, today we finally did our third, and finally did what we had planned to do first, a Scotch Ale. We're still keeping it simple and using malt extract as the base for the beer (as opposed to doing a mash), but this time we added the hops ourselves and used some grains for flavour. Here are the ingredients that went into our brew:

• Unhopped pale liquid malt extract
• Crystal malt
• Chocolate malt
• Brown sugar (imparts a rum-like flavour says the recipe)
• Fuggle hop pellets
• Safale S-04 yeast

The wort is dark in colour, quite hoppy and very, very sweet. Actually, it's pretty awful at the moment. Though from previous experience I've found this is not a great indicator (to me anyway) of what the beer is going to taste like.

First taste of the first home brew

We tried our first bottle of our first home brew tonight. Although it was recommended that we wait at least three weeks after bottling before drinking the beer, we wanted to ensure that it was ok before we bottle our second brew (the ginger beer) this weekend. It's hard to tell looking at an unopened bottle whether the beer has become carbonated, but upon hearing the hiss after popping the lid, I felt reassured. The beer was actually better than we expected. It's just a kit beer and it didn't taste all that promising when we tried it on bottling day. I thought for sure that Simon would be drinking the whole batch, but I didn't mind it. There's something I don't like in commercial beers, though I'm not quite sure what it is, that seems to be absent (or at least much less pronounced) in home brew. It's also promising that the beer is supposed to get better the longer we bottle condition it. Here's a photo of me with the first beer.

Home brew

Two weeks ago, Simon and I got ourselves a home brew kit and made our first brew. It was just a kit job, nothing special, but for that first go we wanted to make sure we had the basics (namely sanitation) right. We think the only thing we did wrong was not press the rubber seal in the fermenter lid in well enough to form a perfect seal. As a result, we didn't see bubbling of the liquid in the airlock, just a change in the liquid levels indicating higher pressure inside than out. Fortunately, the other signs of fermentation were present.

This morning we bottled that first batch. I think we ended up with 28 bottles of various sizes. Simon has been diligently drinking beer to collect the bottles for the last few weeks. We had to use some purpose-bought plastic bottes to make up the numbers though. We did, of course, taste the beer before bottling it. It's not brilliant but it also doesn't taste off so I think we did right with the sanitation.

The novelty hasn't worn off, so this afternoon we made a small batch (about 10L) of ginger beer. This was a little more interesting than the kit beer as it was a recipe of our own devising and it involved a few more ingredients. I think we also ended up with a better quality, more vigorous yeast, as I don't think the increase in airlock activity over the last batch can only be explained by a better seal around the lid. Having tasted the wort before fermentation, I have high hopes for the end result.