#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.