freshness

[littledavid]

I used to brew beer back in the 90s, which I enjoyed very much. However, one seeming fact of brewing with LME seems to have escaped me.

I did a couple brews with LME from an HBS in the Philly area after restarting my brewing recently, and they were ok. Tried a couple of different kinds of liquid yeast, couple of different kinds of LME. Meh. Looking for a cheaper source of extract, I noticed that an online vendor I was interested in championed the freshness of their LME. Another with great prices did the same. So I took the bait...

Well... I am just tasting the first fruits of my beers with this extract, and it is a *world* of difference. Like, wow. A high gravity ale that had only been in the bottle for a week (don't judge me) already is easily surpassing my earlier efforts by a mile. Last night, I again tried a (lower gravity) beer that was, again, only one week bottled and I'm so psyched about this extract.

How in the world did I never consider this before? Lesson learned.

 

[unionrdr]

Fresh ingredients should always work better...usually. I made a Salvator doppel bock "clone" from a cooper's OS lager can,Munton's plain extra light DME,& 2 kinds of hops. Gary at Home Brewer TV gave it 3 thumbs up! So,properly done,even old (but sealed) LME can still work it's magic.
Now all I gotta do is compute how much darkening I got from the 6/09 cooper's can to duplicate it. Just started searching for ideas...Congrats on your return!