Pfffft.

Ah, the sound I’ve been waiting on for over two weeks.  Scott and I opened the 1 gallon jug to taste our first homebrew!  We had made about ¾ of a gallon of Brown Ale (shown below).  Because it was a homebrew, the aging yeast had settled to the bottom of the jug, so we had to be cognizant of that when pouring the beer into pint glasses.  Along with our girlfriends, Scott and I embarked on our tasting.

The look, the smell and the taste

During the pour, the first thing we noticed was that there was hardly any foam forming at the top of the pint glass.  Clearly, our beer did not possess the same level of carbonation that a commercially-brewed beer would.  The color exhibited a somewhat cloudy (because it was unfiltered), dark sepia or russet shade of brown.  The nose was solid.  We could definitely smell the dark malts.  We put the glass to our lips and let the beer roll from the front part of our tongues to the back.  Malty, with very little hop flavor.  Unfortunately, as we noticed during the pour, the beer was significantly flatter than we would have liked.  We also had a problem keeping the yeast out of the pour.  During subsequent sips, partially due to the yeast, the beer had slight undertones of a Belgian brown, perhaps along the lines of a Leffe Brun.  During the second pour, we attempted using a cheese cloth to filter out the yeast, but we were not very successful.

Going forward

Despite the two small setbacks, Scott and I were very happy with this first attempt.  To fix the carbonation issue, we plan to age our other beers at least one week longer than we did the Brown Ale.  In addition, we plan to find a better way to filter out the yeast when we pour into serving glasses. All in all, it was a great start!

I’d like to hear from you.  Do you have any ideas on how to fix the lack of carbonation and filtering out the yeast?  Please share your thoughts on that or any other comments you have.