Apparently, this past week was American Craft Beer Week, and no one told me. How did this happen? I only found out while catching up on the past week’s Colbert Report (how did I survive without a TiVo anyway).
While I am disappointed that I didn’t know about this, it does make me thing that it is time to think about some homebrewing again. It has been too long since I’ve done that, and I think we could stand to try some sort of light summery beer.
I wrote before about the sad state of my Honey Weizen beer.
I finally decide it was time to empty and clean out the bottle so maybe we could try again. Amazingly, when I opened a bottle (which I may have shaken up a bit), lots of beer and foam came out.
Somehow, it seems to have become carbonated after I gave up on it. I will have to wait until some is cold to see if it tastes good (and the warm sip I had was not too encouraging), but this may not be the total waste I thought.
If nothing else, it may be encouraging enough to make we want to try brewing again sooner rather than later.
I’m very sad because I think my most recent attempt at brewing didn’t work too well.
This was the third time Beth and I tried to brew beer (not counting a few times in college, but I don’t think our tastes were too sophisticated then).
Our first two attempts were maple beer and a nut brown ale. Both of those came out pretty well. The nut brown ale was a little too light for my taste, but I think we just used a little too much water.
For our third try, we were going for a Honey Weizen. We had to put two pounds of honey into the mix after boiling the grains. It all seemed so promising. And considering the starting specific gravity, it could have ended up really strong.
Unfortunately, while I think the beer acquired a fair amount of alcohol, it didn’t get carbonated at all. We tried one about a week ago and another yesterday, and there is not bubble to be found. As bad a flat beer is, at least flat beer has know the touch of CO2. Not only is it a shame, but I don’t know what went wrong. We keep things just about as clean as possible (which is extremely important for proper brewing). I keep pretty careful records of everything.
So now I’m stuck with 40 something bottles of undrinkable, flat, Honey Weizen and no idea what went wrong.
As my more or less successful attempts at brewing show, I have a certain interest in micro-brews. I don’t think that makes me too much of a snob, but damn, this Pete’s Wicked Wanderlust Cream Ale is absolutely terrible. I’m talking Genny Cream Ale bad.
This is very surprising coming from Pete’s Wicked.