Either I’m not longer a newbie or even a bad homebrew beats BMC.

My incredibly mediocre Brown Ginger Ale is getting complements from my coworkers. At least I’ll get my bottles emptied faster than if I drank them on my own. I’ve got a really good Stout that has to be bottled in three weeks.

I've yet to receive negative feedback on any of my beer except by hardcore BMC drinkers. I've had a few brews I was less than happy with, but my friends rave about it (and back up their compliments by drinking A TON of it). Even bad homebrew stacks up favorably to light yellow sparkling water.

Don't knock "incredibly mediocre Browns", they've converted more than one person. Ditto Milds.

My "sounding board" is my father-in-law, who seems to appreciate good beer. I have had him try all of my brews. Some of them I was not happy with, but he still raves about them. So, I agree that even mediocre homebrew must be quite a bit better than BMC.

Maybe it's just me, but just about anything is better than BMC IMO (yeah, I'm that guy who brings good beer to every party just in case BMC is the only available offering).

I give certain beers out to lots of folks (usually seasonal stuff) some of whom are beer geeks and some who aren't. Everyone seems to like everything, but the beer geeks are definitely willing to tell me when they think there is something "off" about one of my brews. The non-beer geeks just think it's all terrific.

david_42 said:

Don't knock "incredibly mediocre Browns", they've converted more than one person. Ditto Milds.

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I'm not knocking Browns in general. I'm knocking my Brown in particular.

I was wanting to make a ginger ale and I found a recipe. I didn't overly analyze it before I made it. It turns out that its a Brown Ale recipe that someone just added ginger to. I don't think a Brown Ale is the right kind of beer to add ginger too. If I do it again, I'll either do a Cream Ale with a lot of ginger and steal hops from my pLambic bag or I'll do a sparkling ginger mead and bottle it in the smallest champaign bottles I can find.

Anyway the problems I had along the way included:
1. accidently dumping one of my wife's orchids into the primary after it was sanitized. Had to rewash and resanitize.
2. steeped grains too hot.
2. torn hop bag.
3. plugged siphon due to torn hop bag.
4. I wasn't able to keep the ginger pieces from getting into the primary because of the plugged siphon.
5. Either my o.g. reading was way off or it came out extremely weak.

To sumarize, it was my worst brew day so far.

The main problem with the flavor is the hop bitterness and the ginger didn't come out as seperate flavors. It all comes across together as a very strong and astrigent hop bitterness.

One of my beers that I just couldn't stand due to astringent flavors got me the most compliments. I still don't understand that one.