So Yeah, Dood…

My friend, coworker, and new BaltiBrew member Lyle Albright just bottled his first batch of homebrew and was kind enough to give me two bottles of his American Brown Ale to sample. While talking to Lyle about his brew — and I haven’t even tasted it yet — it occurred to me to dispense some “I wish I would have done this with my first brew” advice to him and to you readers.

Don’t drink it all too fast. Save a half dozen bottles or so. Store them properly — upright, in a cool, dark place — and taste them periodically over time. Speaking from experience, I can say this is incredibly difficult to do. You made your first beer and you’re supposed to wait to drink it?!?!?! Crazy talk, I know.

But trust me — if you’re interested in learning a lot about how beer matures and ages, AND a lot about yourself as a brewer, it makes perfect sense to squirrel some away.

Here’s why:

1. Letting your beer fully bottle condition is a tough task. It’s a patience thing. You just waited a couple weeks to ferment your beer, and now you have to wait another two for it to bottle condition? You’re damn right you do, but to be honest; nobody seems to the first time through. Even if you do a better job of carbonating your first beer than I did — or most brewers do for that matter — the beer may still be a bit sweet if you don’t exercise some patience. It may be fully carbonated, but that extra sugar may not still be fully attenuated. Residual sweetness isn’t always bad, but it isn’t always good either.
2. Beer matures in interesting ways. When a brewer first bottles a beer, he or she has already inherently changed the beer from the state it was in before moving it from a fermenter and adding priming sugar. It will continue to evolve over time. In the short term, as the sugars used to bottle condition the beer are eaten by the remaining yeast in the bottle you will notice the beer change in character. This may be subtle or it may be dramatic, but I guarantee that it will change. You can learn over time how beer sometimes improves in flavor over time, but then reaches a point where it declines, or vice-versa. But you can’t learn these lessons without tasting the same beer as it ages over a long period of time — like a year or more.
3. You’ll learn what you may have done wrong. If you’ve caught the bug — because your beer turned out better than you thought it would, or because it didn’t and you want to get it right, or for whatever reason — you’ll probably brew again. When you do, even if it’s a completely different recipe or style you may notice a whole slew of different things that can help you become a better brewer if you can compare the new batches to that first attempt. You’ll notice whether a slight infection was present, or perhaps a MAJOR infection — and this will teach you to sanitize better in the future. You’ll notice differences in clarity, carbonation, general character — the list goes on and on. If you pay attention to what you like, and what you think is concretely good or bad about your different attempts, you can learn what you want to always do the same way, and what you never want to do again.
4. It’s a good reminder. Our first humble attempts can be great ways to remind us of our humble origins, and they can also show us how far we’ve come since we set out to brew that first batch.

Treat yourself to this experience. I guarantee it’ll be worth it even if I can’t say I did the same thing my first time around.

Tags: Advice for beginning brewers, Aging Beer, Learning from your mistakes, Learning from your successes, Saving your first batch

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Beer, Brewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.