Home Brew Talk: Don't Run Before You Can Walk

It's been quite some time since i've updated this blog and there's a few reasons for this. Laziness figures quite highly - sometimes its just difficult to motivate yourself to write, especially when you aren't sure if anyone is actually reading it. Lack of beers to review - my wife and i have been living a bit more frugally of late to try and save a deposit for a house so i've not been buying beers to review, only drinking my home brews. Why not review the home brews, i hear that one reader think to themselves. Well, this gets to the crux of the matter - one v.successful wheat beer brew made me think i already had this brewing malarkey down and so i've been experimenting wildly with my brews and ending up with less than drinkable results.

I don't want to get into to much detail about the mistakes i've made. A general overview should give you an idea of what not to do if you try home brewing yourself.

Brew 1 - Decided to brew another one of the kits i had, a Woodforde Wherry Ale (This one came with my home brew equipment kits that i had got for Christmas). This was to be a stop gap brew until i got more ingredients to do my own brew. I decided to try and give it more depth of flavour by not only boiling the wort with some of the hops i had left from my wheat beer brew but also to leave some hopes in the fermenting tub to steep with the beer.

Mistake 1 - Steeping Hops in the fermenting tub. This became a nightmare to remove from the beer and not get leaves into the bottles. Also the steeping gave the beer a far too hoppy flavour - though i did find after a month in the bottle it did become drinkable if you had it with a touch of lemonade.

Brew 2 - Full grain brew. I decided to attempt a Belgian style beer using just grains and no malt extracts. The success of my wheat beer which had included a partial grain element - using my makeshift mashing technique of boiling in my wifes jam pot with a frying pad for a lid - led to me to assume i could get away with this kind of brew without a mash tun.

Mistake 2 - Assuming a makeshift, ineffecient mashing technique would work. My beer ended up flavourless as my mashing technique obviously failed to get as much out of the grains as would be needed to make a good beer.

Brew 3 - Flavoured Beers. Had noticed that the brew store had flavourings that you could use in beers and i thought i could have a go at that. Make some nice light flavoured beers for the summer. These would also test out the small batch technique of using demijohns to ferment in 6l batches. This was again a full grain brew and i got Raspberry and Ginger Flavourings to make a Raspberry beer, a Ginger Beer and a Raspberry and Ginger Beer.

Mistake 3 - Tried to only use whole grains so again didn't get enough flavour from the hops to have a decent base beer for the flavourings. I also was far too stingy with the flavourings so ended up with tasteless beers.

Brew 4 - Upon learning my mistakes that my mashing technique wasn't get as much out of the grains as i would hope, i went back to using this technique only as a top up to the liquid malt extracts. To this end i decided to try another approach to making a flavoured beer. Making up my Scottish Export kit and mashing some Whisky and some Peated Malt grains to make a Whisky tinged beer. This wasn't a massive disaster however, wasn't that great either.

Mistake 4 - The added whisky and peaty flavours served to get the beer a far too smoky flavour. I also think a mistake was made at bottling with too much sugar added as the beer foams up quickly and starts flowing out the bottle upon opening.

So today, its back to basics and back to my original successful wheat beer recipe. Not tinkering - apart from one enforced ingredient change. One that could have a bit impact unfortuately - the Hefeweizen liquid yeast i used first time around was unavailable at the brew store - so i will be using a dried Bavarian Wheat beer yeast instead. Fingers crossed i have something more enjoyable to drink this time.