The wait. Homebrewing

Pretty new brewer to the hobby here. I just wanted to make a quick post about how important waiting for your beer to mature is. I'm about a month into my first beer and I can't begin to tell you the different stages it's gone through, throughout the process. To begin I didn't think much of my first beer, I thought it as a learning experience and expected it to not be a very drinkable beer. I decided to make a Bell's Two Hearted Ale IPA Clone as my first beer. A lot had led up to my brew day, including a lot of research and reading of posts on /r/Homebrewing! Possibly, due to the holidays, there a some of you in the same boat and I just wanted to give you my experience with brewing my first beer.

At first I though it was a complete trainwreck, I tasted it a bit and did not see it as a very tasteful beer. I admittedly never had Bell's two hearted ale and had no idea what it tasted like. I let my beer ferment for a week and added in my hops. I thought it would be a decent beer at bottling time. Well when bottling time came I taste tested it, was not very happy about it and the worst part was that I had 5 gallons of it to drink. It tasted really pumpkiny and fruity and just not what I had expected from an IPA.

Over the course of the next few weeks though, I was very impressed on how the flavors had changed. I left the two bottled cases in a 70 degree room and decided to take a few bottles and toss them in the refrigerator whenever I had the urge to drink a few. Making sure to only do around a 6 pack at most at a time. The first six pack I chilled about a week after bottling, I was not very impressed with they still had that fruity taste that was just not very pleasant.

However, about two weeks after bottling I put more into the fridge and they were tasting significantly better. Still not as I suspected, but they didn't have that fruity taste anymore. There's plenty of pointers out there, but I really want to drive home the point that beer gets better with age. The longer you can give it to mature the better. I had no idea the type of impact time could have on a beer and I really encourage new brewers to take this into account and also taste test their beer as it ages to truly grasp how much it matures.

That's all, carry on /r/Homebrewing :)

Submitted January 02, 2016 at 03:24AM by EpicDildo http://ift.tt/1SqW0V4 Homebrewing