My Last First Brew!

So I was rummaging around in my homebrew case stack, and I found the last bottle (a 750) of the first brew I ever did---a basil pale ale. Loved the stuff, and it was pretty cool to go back to my first beer 6 months later. And it was still good stuff...though, it had taken on this weird plastic-y taste. Not enough to ruin the beer...but I'm just wondering what could account for this. It's been like 3 months at least since I had the second-to-last bottle, and this is the first time the beer has shown this trait. Might've been the water...but why would that suddenly make a difference after all this time? Oh well...still, good stuff for my firsty. :fro:

The only thing I can think of might be oxidation. It has been six months, and it was your first beer, which means that you may not have done everything perfectly. And supposedly oxidation shows up months after bottling. Maybe it was a cardboardy taste?

I had my last first beer a couple months ago. I was shocked at how much I didn't like it, it didn't have a specific off-flavor, it just tasted kinda harsh. What I was trying to figure out was whether:

1. That beer had deteriorated from age
2. I have a much better palatte that when I started
3. I'm making much better beers not, and my standards have risen.

PROBABLY a combination of all three... but I like to that that it's mostly #3!

Definitely not oxidation---being a wine geek, I'm all too familiar with oxidation (Savoie, anyone?)---this was distinctly plasticy, artificial, like I had soaked a ziplock bag in it or something. Dunno.

Bird,

My first batch was the exception on that front. Not harsh at all. But the 2nd, 3rd and 4th batches all had this odd harshness, kind of a metallic sour thing. My beers have definitely gotten better since then. Aeration, liquid yeast, starters and partial mashing are the biggest reasons, IMHO.

My last first beer was gone about 11 years ago. I brewed a Coopers Draft with an additional 3 pounds of DME. It was the best beer I ever had. (Probably because I made it) I remember drinking that last bottle and thinking "man this beer has really gotten good. I wish there were more left." To this day I still have a problem being patient with my new beers.

Did it give a good pfsst when you opened it? Some times the "cheapy" caps that come with kits are not great sealers and air gets in. One of my first batches I did had bad caps... some from one bag and some from a new bag I had to buy to do that batch with. I lost about a third of the batch because of it. When I opened the bad caps, they didn't give a "good" sound but a weak "noise" and the beer just tasted yuk.