How long did it take you until you made a awesome batch?

[Ogri]

I enjoy a bass. They are good. Old speckled hen was hard to choke down. It could have gone bad. I can't imagine it gets ordered often...

Every bottle of Bass Pale Ale I've ever had here in Japan, (actually, now that I think of it, Bass never was high on my list of beers before I left Blighty), has been really lacking in any flavour. Bland and boring is the only way I could express it. Every bottle of Old Speckled Hen/Old Crafty Hen I've had here has left me thinking what a wonderfully, nutty, sweet, yet not cloyingly so, easy to drink and flavourful beer it is. So much so that I decided to buy some Marris Otter, Fuggles, Kent Goldings and use the Crystal 70 I have kicking around to try my hand at all grain and do an OSH clone. Maybe it's just not your cup o' tea but I'd really like to think you just got a sh1tty example of it. see if you can get a bottle, if it was draught that you had that gave you the impression you currently tout, and see if there's a difference.

 

[chungking]

Haha funny how people have such dramatic perceptions in taste. It was a draft and after the bartender poured it, it had a hazy/cloudiness to it that seemed to fizz away to the top as foam. I was even a few beers deep when I had it and still didnt like it...

 

[kombat]

That "taste" you're describing is extract twang, and it's from using canned liquid extract and boiling it too long. Try using fresh LME from a plastic tub (not a can) and only boil half it for the full boil, adding the rest at the end. Also, as others have pointed out, temperature control during fermentation is crucial.

To answer your question, during my "first chapter" of homebrewing, all I did was canned kits, and the best of them were drinkable, with that "twang," while the worst were undrinkable paint thinner (fermented with a heating belt!) that ended up getting dumped down the drain. I gave up for a few years.

My "second chapter" started a couple of months ago. Thanks to everything I read and learned here, I completely stepped up my game. My first two batches were extract kits, and still had a bit of that "twang," but not nearly as bad. They were perfectly drinkable, but still not comparable to commercial examples. My third batch was a partial mash IPA ("Laughing Heart IPA," from Papazian's book). The difference was night-and-day. It was fantastic. The next batch was an all-grain pale ale with no extract at all, and I was blown away by how delicious it is. No "twang" at all, easily as good (or better) than local craft beers. But by then, I had really dialed in my process and was employing a repurposed chest freezer as a fermentation chamber, using spring water, and so on.

Fifth batch was an all-grain Dry Irish Stout, also delicious. It should get even better with age, but I don't think it's going to last that long.

Batches 6 through 10 are currently in various stages of fermentation and clarification, but I have no doubt they'll all be equally fantastic.

 

[bobbrews]

My very first batch was awesome, and all batches since then have continued to be awesome. I started brewing with my very own partial mash recipe. Aside from minor things, like slightly higher FG than expected, the beer as a whole exceeded my expectations as well as my friends.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I think this question depends on the individual brewer's desire to get it right the first time. I had a recipe in hand, but delayed for a good 4 months before I my actual brewday so that I could soak up as much knowledge as possible.

I've appreciated a lot of the upper echelon IPAs from Kern, Russian River, Alpine, Lagunitas, Lawson's Finest, Hill Farmstead, etc. So it really made me happy that I was able to mimic that type of quality at home on my very first attempt.

 

[chungking]

This time I did use lme from a plastic tub. Got the kit from Midwest per everyone advising me to. All previous batches were from canned lme. I guess this is what added to my disappointment, cause I switched vendors and thought I'd gotten better fresher ingredients, and would taste the difference.

However, I did boil all the lme for 60 minutes. I will try the late additions next...

 

[redfox97]

Well I did 3 ok extracts, 1 terrible AG, 1 ok AG, and finally one really good Blonde AG. Biggest thing I can suggest is to find a homebrew club to join. That is what I did. We have 3 certified judges which helps a lot. Everyone has tasted my beers and I have gotten a lot of feedback to steer me in the right direction.

 

[metanoia]

Every bottle of Bass Pale Ale I've ever had here in Japan, (actually, now that I think of it, Bass never was high on my list of beers before I left Blighty), has been really lacking in any flavour. Bland and boring is the only way I could express it.

Well that's probably because Bass is now made by Molson Coors Brewing. :/

 

[JKaranka]

I enjoy a bass. They are good. Old speckled hen was hard to choke down. It could have gone bad. I can't imagine it gets ordered often...

That's weird, Old Speckled is a well rounded, warming, nutty brown ale. Out of all cask ales I've had it is probably the most consistent, can't really go wrong ordering it. Only thing is that it isn't terribly exciting (although it's good). You might want to get a London Pride or a Black Sheep best bitter for widely available British flavours.

 

[31FIFTY]

First batch was amazing. Batches 2-4 were off. Im on 5 and I am pretty optimistic.

My off batches were off due to high fermentation temps and my water levels being off.

 

[robertus]

My first couple of batches were pretty good. My middle batches were kind of lousy. Made a few adjustments (mostly controlling temperatures and changing around the process a little), and the two most recent batches have been pretty close to awesome. Maybe some small tweaks to the recipe here or there, but nothing so major as to be concerned about it.

 

[chungking]

I ordered a speckled pale ale, or at least that is what the menu said, not the brown ale...

Seems like there's a lot of beginners luck. My first one was good, second was better, then has gone downhill. i didn't really start researching anything till I found this website/app. Seems like I didn't start getting getting crazy off flavors until I started trying to improve my processes.

 

[jerrodm]

Can't speak for others, but I think for me the "beginner's luck" was a combination of a couple of things:

- I didn't really have any baseline for what homebrewed beer would taste like, since I didn't know anyone who brewed and had never tried homebrew before. So when I tasted that first batch and it was honest-to-god beer, my expectations were more than met. After a couple of batches I kind of knew what I should expect, so I got better at detecting deviations from the "standard".

- For me, starting to brew my own beer was a doorway into drinking craft brew, not vice versa. I was a poor student, and then a poor enlisted person, so my expensive beer was miller high life instead of PBR. As I started brewing my own and as I started drinking better beer, my palate developed and I figured out what my preferences were. And I got better at detecting problems in my own product.

- I started out on relatively easy to produce styles--stouts, brown ales, esbs &c. As I tried out beers with less complex flavor profiles, the flaws (like ester production from improper fermentation temps) made themselves more readily apparent. You can get away with quite a bit when brewing a stout, since there's so much flavor going on there already it can mask some imperfections.

Also, I think the beer gods give a little extra help to most newbies, to encourage them to keep plugging away at it. If my first four batches had been undrinkable, I don't know that I would have kept going.

 

[metanoia]

I think that always learning more about the brewing process is the biggest part of how a home brewer pushes past that valley of crappy results. I made my first two batches after simply reading through "How to Brew" a couple of times, and they came out alright. Since then I've been poking around these forms a lot, reading a few other books, listening to podcasts, and simply searching Google for all kinds of beer knowledge I hear about. Even after almost a year hiatus from brewing, I feel like the batch I'm getting ready to bottle tomorrow, despite being a boring brown ale extract kit (that I'm turning into a gingerbread brown), is going to be much more exceptional than my first few batches. This is certainly due to things like: taking hydrometer readings and tasting the sample afterwards, controlling fermentation temperature (normal during primary, then warmed up a few days, and now cold crashing), better sanitation practices (Star San FTW), and more.

 

[Yesfan]

My first batch was pretty good. It was an American Wheat. The second was NB's Nut Brown Ale. That one wasn't as good as the first, but still drinkable. The Nut Brown has a sharp bite in the after taste and seems to have a low mouth feel (if any of that makes sense). Both of those batches I used a swamp cooler.

My 4th batch was the Caribou Slobber. It seemed everything went wrong from start to finish with this beer. Glad it's just a one gallon kit. It tastes a bit flat too, but doesn't have as sharp of a bite in the aftertaste as the Nut Brown.

My 3rd batch is my home run batch. It's the Dead Ringer IPA. I'm not a big IPA lover, but this I would definitely buy at a store. Of the few IPAs I've sampled, I like Sweetwater's IPA the best. Mine's second best (to me anyways).

That batch put a smile on my face and gave me enough confidence to make the jump to all grain, which is batches 5 and 6 (Phat Tyre & Dawson's Multi Red). Hoping to start those Thanksgiving weekend.

 

[iambeer]

Exactly 37 days. No more, no less.

 

[Hackwood]

I have had a bunch. All Brewer's Best kits. Red Ale was good, Milk stout was good, Kolsch was good, Amber was good,m American Light was good, but the Whisky Barrerl Stout and the Summer Ale have been AMAZING!

My All-Grain Summer Ale was better then the BB(I might be biased) but not by much. SWMBO likes the extract better, but I like the AG.

All of my AG have been decent to goo so far and seem to get better with every batch.

 

[Jdslep]

I didn't read all the replies, but the most obvious thing is that you have to wait longer than two weeks in the bottle sometimes. Maybe I just brew bad beer, but I find that mine has to sit for a month to taste the way I want.

 

[tigwelda]

I'm am no expert by any stretch, but I was thinking that some time in a secondary fermentor will help mellow your beer out also give it more time to let all the solids settle to the bottom. And play with your priming sugars a bit.