#1: Festabrew West Coast IPA

Santa brought me a fantastic gift of a homebrew starter package c/w a kit of Festabrew West Coast IPA, the same beer I sampled from my neighbour last year.  Festabrew is a microbrewery in Ontario that also sells brewer's wort, as opposed to the more typical kits of malt extract you see in the grocery store.  I followed the instructions to the letter but still managed to screw a few things up.  Most notably:

1. When I racked the beer from the primary fermentor into the carboy, I didn't do it very gently and a huge head of foam developed, which eventually grew through the airlock and spilled out onto the floor (Whistler handled the cleanup).

2. Due to some other commitments I ended up with only one night to bottle the beer.  And that night also happened to be the night of a huge snowstorm.  So I was unable to get the proper "brewer's sugar" (corn sugar) to bulk prime the beer, and ended up using an organic cane sugar instead.

Whistler and I, however, are not easily deterred.  We forged onwards nonetheless, bottling our first batch (with some help from Kelly) on Jan 12.  The bottles are required to condition for a minimum of 2 weeks.  The tasting notes are as follows:

Jan 15

Flat.  Sweet, cidery flavour.  Not very good.

Jan 21

Nicely carbonated.  Yeasty aroma.  Nice hoppy flavour.  Unpleasant bitter aftertaste.  Overall reasonably decent.

Jan 27 (2 weeks in the bottle)

Well carbonated.  Grassy, sweet aroma.  Copper colour, slight haze.  Nice hoppy flavour.  A little metallic taste?  Unpleasant aftertaste gone.

At two weeks I moved half of the bottles into the cellar to begin chilling, and left the remainder to continue bottle conditioning at room temperature.  My plan is to sample the beer that is continuing to condition at three weeks, and again at four weeks, to see if it continues to improve.

Prologue. Or, M&W Brewing Begins

Last October a neighbour and fellow beer aficionado gave me a bottle of his homebrew'd West Coast IPA to sample.  I wasn't expecting much, as most of my homebrew memories involve plastic bottles of horrible tasting swill.  But I treated the beer with respect nonetheless; I properly chilled it, poured it off into a nice clean glass and rated it just the same as I have been rating all Maritime beer since moving to Halifax in Nov 2008.  The score?  A very respectable 8 out of 10.  With comments such as "sweet citrusy faint hoppy aroma" and "nice hoppy / grassy flavour".  To provide some perspective, most of the beers brewed by the local microbreweries (who brew excellent beer) rate (in my book) between 7 and 9.  So an 8 out of 10, for a homebrew, is a coup.  And given the cost of a bottle of homebrew is orders of magnitude cheaper than the commercial product, I cursed myself for not getting into brewing sooner.  And promptly incorporated Morris & Whistler Brewing Co.  Morris (that's me - my middle name) will be the brewer, with Whistler (the dog) providing the brains of the operation and spill control.  This blog will be a chronicle of our brewing journey.