As I said in the recipe for Brew Seven, at this rate I will be drowning in beer because when I bottle the Amber Ale in a couple of weeks time I will have approximately 90 bottles of beer in storage. I best get drinking!
The good news is that there isn't much, if any, of the original Munich 'Lager' or the kit 'IPA' and by my reckoning I only have about half a dozen bottles of the first proper IPA and the original Amber Ale.
It's interest how the flavour profiles of the beer change over time as I shared a couple of bottles of the kit 'IPA' on the weekend and it tasted sweet and almost like a wheat beer which I can imagine would be quite enjoyable to drink on a hot summers afternoon when you've just finished mowing the lawns. The original Amber Ale has also softened over time and doesn't have such a harsh bitter hop taste to it either. I also tasted a bottle of the American Brown Ale which has been in the bottle for three weeks. It tasted awesome so I'm excited to see how it matures over the next month or so but I could be onto a winner there.
I'll be interested to see how Brew Seven comes out as it was pretty dark for an Amber Ale and I mucked around a bit more than I would have liked to with the recipe.
I'm at the stage now where I seem to be able to produce some reasonably tasty beer so the trick will be to try to reproduce it consistently over a number of brews. On the other hand I don't want to restrict myself by only doing a couple of different styles and I would also like to figure out how to introduce some local NZ hops into the brews as opposed to having to use the US style hops.
Lastly, I picked up a huge pot for only $45 the other day. I say huge because I'm unclear how big it is exactly as the writing on the sticker is in Chinese. This weekend I'll use a bucket to fill it up to see how much it is exactly and then do a test boil to see how quickly it comes up to the boil. If I am going to move to full size boils I probably need a way to cool the wort down and a hose to transfer it to the fermenter. The other option is to look to moving to a Brew in a Bag process as an intermediate step on the journey to All Grain.
The good news is that there isn't much, if any, of the original Munich 'Lager' or the kit 'IPA' and by my reckoning I only have about half a dozen bottles of the first proper IPA and the original Amber Ale.
It's interest how the flavour profiles of the beer change over time as I shared a couple of bottles of the kit 'IPA' on the weekend and it tasted sweet and almost like a wheat beer which I can imagine would be quite enjoyable to drink on a hot summers afternoon when you've just finished mowing the lawns. The original Amber Ale has also softened over time and doesn't have such a harsh bitter hop taste to it either. I also tasted a bottle of the American Brown Ale which has been in the bottle for three weeks. It tasted awesome so I'm excited to see how it matures over the next month or so but I could be onto a winner there.
I'm at the stage now where I seem to be able to produce some reasonably tasty beer so the trick will be to try to reproduce it consistently over a number of brews. On the other hand I don't want to restrict myself by only doing a couple of different styles and I would also like to figure out how to introduce some local NZ hops into the brews as opposed to having to use the US style hops.
Lastly, I picked up a huge pot for only $45 the other day. I say huge because I'm unclear how big it is exactly as the writing on the sticker is in Chinese. This weekend I'll use a bucket to fill it up to see how much it is exactly and then do a test boil to see how quickly it comes up to the boil. If I am going to move to full size boils I probably need a way to cool the wort down and a hose to transfer it to the fermenter. The other option is to look to moving to a Brew in a Bag process as an intermediate step on the journey to All Grain.
