Beer tasting question

What should I expect or look for when I taste my beer from the fermenter? This is my first brew and I am just anxious to know if its doing good or bad, but I am not sure what it should be tasting and looking for. Or is this not advised?

It has been just over a week, It is a medium bodied cream ale extract kit I got from northern brewer.

Any help is much appreciated!

I am just so excited for this! haha

At just over a week, the average cream ale will be pretty much fully fermented and ready to be packaged if the clarity is to your liking. The flavor may still develop over the next couple of weeks as carbonation increases and the yeast finish their job of cleaning up. Hard to say what you will expect as far as flavor. That depends on the recipe and the technique you used.

Some things you may want to taste for include Buttery flavor, green apple, dry bitterness, or astrigency. They are usually considered flaws. And they may be subtle to detect.

Northern Brewer has a pretty good recipe but all of their timelines are MINIMUM. That Cream Ale you are looking at says 2 weeks before you mess with it. That's a good place to start.

The only thing you should be tasting after a week is anticipation. Give it at least another week before you open it. Once you give it enough time, it should taste like flat beer. Nothing should jump out at you as "off". It will continue to improve over the next several weeks, but it should taste good enough that you look forward to drinking an improved and carbonated version of it.

It should taste like flat, warm beer that's been sitting around in a bucket for a week. Because it is. In other words, don't expect to be impressed. But tasting for off flavors is a good idea. Identifying bad things early can help prevent them in the future.

oh cool! Thank you for the quick answers/guidelines. I will wait for the full two weeks and try it out, hopefully everything is tasting good with no flaws. I'm assuming it takes a little training of the tongue to find all those different beer flaw tastes, but ill try!

It's also worth noting that IME lighter beers, like your cream ale, tend to taste better before bottling than the stouts and porters I've brewed. My dark beers changed much more drastically with aging.