Welcome to another installment of My Life as a Home Brewer – 12/23/14. Make sure to like, reblog, follow, share and comment on the blog. This post will deviate slightly from the normal layout, but let’s get started.
What’s Happening Now
We wiped out the remaining stout to make Christmas presents. We have a case of IPA, brown ale, and hefeweizen left. However, the hefeweizen won’t be ready to drink for another week. I doubt we are going to do another batch this year.
The Christmas Six Packs were a success -at least I think they were. My grandpa, uncles and cousins seemed pleased about getting beer for Christmas, but only time will tell if they liked it. The six packs had two brown ales, two IPA’s and two hefeweizens. We told them that we had just bottled the hefeweizen and to give it two weeks to carbonate.
The trick we learned about putting the heating pad around the fermenting bucket from Jeff at Paradise Brewing Supplies seemed to be a success. We are yet to taste the finished beer, but when I opened the fermenter there was a pungent smell of bananas. This is characteristic of brewer’s yeast when I talked about it in my Thanksgiving Beer post and I anticipate another successful fermentation. We await the final product.
More from My Life As A Home Brewer
How Well do You Know Your IPA?
My Unadulterated Opinion
This week’s flavor comes from Diesel Punk Brewing and is their stout. Let me deviate for a minute from the normal review and talk about the ascetics of the packaging. I love the look and marketing of this brewery. The Steampunk idea of meshing Victorian technology and futuristic sci-fi, ie: spaceships powered by steam engines, combines perfectly with the DieselPunk Stout. Remember in my Six Packs for Christmas post I talked about how the first stouts were made during the Victorian era. Here Diesel Punk combines a victorian classic with a futuristic concept to symbolize the progression of the beer industry and humanity itself. A subtle, but nice touch.
I have to be honest, I was not impressed with my first beer from the six pack. It tasted like a classic stout, but that’s all it was, a classic stout. There was nothing to set it apart. It had all the right flavors, but I didn’t have that, “wow moment” on the first drink. However, as I progressed through the six pack over the next several days I found myself liking the beer more and more.
It had an aromatic, light brown head and a dark brown color that is almost black, but not quite. Roasted malts of coffee, espresso and chocolate abound in this beer. The aroma matches these flavors and the bitterness of the hops was just right. There was a nice balance between the bitter and sweet. The drinking experience was smooth and pungent. This is not a beer for Christmas dinner, because it will over power anything on the table. Regardless of my initial thoughts, I liked it. Drink this beer.
The Year End Wrap Up
This has been an amazing experience for me to home brew with my father. I just returned home from being gone during four years of college. Home brewing with dad has been so much fun and has brought us together on a different level (not that we had relationship issues before). I want to thank him for footing most of the cost and having these experiences with me. We learned so much and had more fun.
Brewing beer is awesome. Neither one of us had ever done anything like it, but had talked about it for years. We made eight beer batches since July 4th and only had one bad batch, which I think is fantastic for two new guys. We hope to keep up the pace for next year and try something, “outside our comfort zone” to quote my dad from this evening. I don’t know what that means, yet.
This was also my first blog launch. I had dabbled with WordPress before, but never created a full site that I solely managed. I learned a ton about web writing and can’t wait to bring you better content with the new year. Let’s briefly recap the site statistics as of writing this post.
The site since my first post, What Home Brewing Is Not, that went live on 10/21/14 has had 353 site views with 325 of them coming from Facebook alone. I wrote ten posts with Kegs, Growlers, Bombers, Bottles and Cans being my most read post at 35 views. I had readers from five countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark and Austria. I didn’t make any financial income from the blog or contributions to it.
Thank you for reading My Life as a Home Brewer – 12/24/14. Please like, reblog, follow, comment and share on your favorite social media sites. Thank you to all who read and shared during these last ten weeks. It’s because of you that I will step up my game for next year with a new WordPress theme, proper web hosting and much, much more. I have so many ideas to turn loose in the new year and I can’t wait to show you.
If you have any suggestions, comments, or anything else about the new format for next year, please feel free to email me at mylifeasahomebrewer@gmail.com.
I will not post next week on 12/30/14 since as it is the last Tuesday of the year and I look forward to posting on 1/6/15. See you next year!
Prost!
MY LIFE AS A HOME BREWER 
Keep up the good work! I enjoy reading your blog each week!
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