If you found a box of the homebrew you had completely forgotten about in your storage room would you drink it? What if one of the beers was almost 9 years old? still yes. Well this week I found such a box, pulled out a couple of bottles and gave them a try, and as you have probably worked out given I'm posting this, surprisingly didn't die.
I used to homebrew, I don't anymore due to lack of time, space, and ability to drink the volume of the outcome. I struggle enough to keep up with the endless stream of commercial beers I want to drink let alone adding homebrew testing and enjoying into the mix.
When I was home brewing I was full grain brewing - using a technique called Brew-in-a-Bag then a large urn with a huge reusable cloth bag which has a heap of grains in it - steep this at around 65 degrees for a hour or so, this haul the bag out - sort of like a oversized teabag. What is left is the wort, boiled said wort for an hour, add hops, cool, put in fermenter, add yeast, wait a week or so, bottle - done.
Except my process seems to now include, put box in cupboard, completely forget about it, but we are back with two beers so let's get drinking....
I should mention my 'brewery' was called Fiction brewing (cause I was making this shit up as I went along)
This is the 'Victoria Pale Ale' it was brewed to celebrate moving into our new house in Victoria street. It is a fairly standard easy drinking pale ale - 4.2% alcohol and with two of my favourite hops Citra and Vic Secret (which hails from the state of Victoria in Australia, and who of course is the same Queen Victoria that my street is named after - and same street that Victoria Bitter one of the biggest selling beers in Australia is named for)
Anyway enough history, how does this beer brewed in April 2017 taste like almost 5 years later?
Well a 4.2% alcohol hopped beer probably shouldn't be aged and this beer is no different. It looks lovely - beautiful amber golden colour clear and with a Solid head which is holding. The smell is not much of anything, which isn't really surprising, hops give aroma and it's the hops that die in a beer over time - so where once this would have smelt fruity and a touch resiny it's now more malt based - a little bready. The taste is not quite what I expected, there is nothing wrong with it, but also there is nothing distinctive about it. it's enjoyable enough, some (okay Me) might even say about as enjoyable and distinctive as a number of commercial pale ale on the market but If it wasn't my child I'm not sure I'd be that impressed.
Next up is a beer that I had brewed a number of times, you can tell by the fact that it has a better darn good label design. It's called GRRRRR! It's an American style brown ale (modelled after one of my favourite beers at the time 2Brothers Growler) and this bottle is from April 2013
That's almost 9 years ago, when this beer was placed in that bottle Margaret Thatcher was still alive (just see would die the next day), Julia Gillard was still PM of Australia (just, we would last another couple of months and we have had 4 PMs since then), Australia had never competed in Eurovision, A young fella named Lewis Hamilton had driven just his second race for Mercedes, finishing a very promising third.
So what happens to a an American brown ale after all that time? We let's see. Brown was always a bit of a misnomer for this beer and it pours a deep brown, almost black with a solid tan head (although this did die over time.) Most of the hops are gone, So given that an 'American Style' version of any beer just means more hops, this basically goes back to to tasting like a slightly sweeter than normal English brown ale, which I guess an American brown without the hops would be, with the sweetness coming from what was needed to make it balanced in the first instance. This is very drinkable, this always reminds me I was a pretty good brewer back in the day.