Mr. Beer Part III

Time has come for the third post on my homebrewing feats.

I finally got to try my beer this week, with what I guess can be called mixed results.

My Diablo IPA is a curious beer. To start with, it has a dark reddish brown tone to it, rather than the dark blond or amber you would come to expect from an IPA. That however, is not a bad thing in itself.

It has a big head of soapy foam, which leaves a fair amount of lacing on the side of the glass. No problem there, obviously, quite the opposite.

Nor is the smell its problem. When I first tried it, last Friday, after a little under two weeks of secondary fermentation and a night in the fridge, it smelled sweet and fruity, almost like a Magic Hat #9. Wow, I thought, not very IPA-like but definitely impressive.

My second bottle, which I opened on Monday, after a full two weeks of secondary fermentation and an overnight conditioning in the fridge, had a much less intense sweet smell. Mind you, it was still fruity, but this was now definitely an IPA. It added a little bit of a grassiness to it and a bitter pang which brought it much closer to what I had expected.

The taste quite largely followed suit. The first bottle was on the malty sweet side, intense and fruity. However, the second bottle was anything but sweet. It was bitter, as an IPA should be, but it was mainly that. The intensity of the flavors had left together with the sugars, it was no longer sweet, but also no longer fruity. It was slightly grassy and earthy, but the flavor was far from overpowering.

I am now on my third bottle and it is much like the second one. It smells nice, has a big head of foam and lots of carbonation, but the taste somehow fails to live up to the expectations.

I do not know if it is a failed case of Goldilocks and the three bears, where I tasted my beer too soon, too late and missed out when it was just right, or I screwed up somewhere else along the way, or this recipe was just not the best one and needs some trimming on my part. One thing's for sure though, I've brewed my first batch of beer of many, because I will not stop until I get it right.... and much less will I stop then.