March 11, 2011 *UPDATE*
Summing up the situation so far:
Primary: 10 days.
No Secondary
Bottled: 10 days
This beer will go from brew kettle to glass in about roughly 21 days. I have just moved the beer from my spare room to the refrigerator which gives it 1 day to cool down before it gets drank. Again, I know that this is normally not a good move to only give them a day to cool before you drink them but I have stated the plan for this beer already. So on with the update!
I was having a few beers on Monday night when I decided to crack one open after about a week carbonating and "aging" if you want to call it that to see what was going on.
My first impression was, first and foremost, that its BEER. Drinkable BEER too!
I guess that is always the question I ask myself when I open the first bottle of any given beer.
The beer has a mild alcohol smell but its not that bad at all. The flavor is slightly thin but a little bit more flavorful that a typical BMC beer, although the flavor is VERY similar. The head of the beer is actually very nice, surprisingly nice to be honest. There is even some lacing.
I feel like i did a very good job of racking and bottling this beer. I left more beer than usual in the primary when I racked it to the bottling bucket. It helped to keep the sediment out since I wasn't using a secondary. I covered the bottling bucket for a while and gave any sediment in the bucket a little bit of time to fall. I also put some sanitized cheesecloth over the inside of the spigot to keep larger sediment out of the bottles. Needless to say, the beer is very clear for being so young.
The big question is the color and well the color
IS tinted green but its a subtle green. The head even has a bit of a green tint to it.
Tomorrow I will take some pictures of the finished product and re-analyze the beer after it has had some time to cool and settle.
And for research and learning reasons I have left a few bottles to age for an extended time period, as I do with most the beers and ciders that I make. There is a nice little box that i will bring out around the holidays so I can retry all of the things I have made over the year!