CayenneSauce

Beers brewed so far;

Batch 1: "Autumn Amber Ale"
Batch 2: "Liberty Cream Ale" - an American Pale Ale as best I can tell
Batch 3: Red Hook ESB Clone
Batch 4: English Bitter
Batch 5: Pilsner Urquell Clone
Batch 6: Porter (still in fermentation)

Considering some of the following for batch #7 - my first stab at doing a recipe of my own, albeit trying to clone Sly Fox's 113 IPA (given substsantial hints from their own web site), a Bass Ale clone, another light Ale or light Lager. Trying to hold off on doing another lager until my basement temp cools down enough for me to brew ales without needing the brew fridge. That's the tough part of lagers - they take roughly twice as long as ales. My first lager (the Pilsner) took 5 weeks fermenting/lagering in the fridge and 3 more in bottle conditioning. Most ales take 2 to ferment and 2 to bottle condition. So doing lagers in the summer once the basement gets too warm for ales to ferment is a problem since it ties up the fridge for so long.

I had not had a Pilsner Urquell for several months, and the last one I had tasted really stale, so now that my copy of it is ready to drink, I bought a single bottle of the real thing from a local resturant that sells singles (and a nice variety too) to do my own taste challenge. While I think that the original was probably a slightly better beer back when it was bottled in Czech Rep., it had clearly suffered in the journey to the US - a bit skunky. So my beer didn't do too badly at all, especially for my first attempt at a lager. Some background - I've wanted to do a lager since shortly after I got started doing homebrew, but chose to wait until I could find a cheap (as it turns out free) used refridgerator to use as my lagering fridge. Once I finally got set up (with the help of a friend with a truck, and another with former moving experience), I spent too much time deliberating over whether I should brew a warmup lager or just go straight for the prize on the first attempt. Glad I did the latter. At this point I've done this enough times now to be pretty confident in my routine, and haven't spoiled a batch yet (just transferred batch #6 to secondary tonight and it tasted fine, so far so good there). As usual I worried far too much about the details.

The first batch was certainly the worst in quality (a bit estery) and even that was very drinkable. I think that the quality has steadily improved and definitely by batch #4 they've gotten to the "damn this is good" stage, if I do say so myself... I'm deliberately trying out a variety of styles. Some of these I'll brew again but I'm trying to get some exposure to different hops varities (which is harder when one brews a recipe that uses more than one hop variety - it's hard to pick out the individual flavors when they are blended together and you have no experience with them by themselves). This is where Sly Fox's IPA Project is helpful - I think they are brewing their single-hop IPAs just to experiment with the flavors also.

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