Light Ale - Brewing and Bottling

I brewed the Light Ale kit from www.morebeer.com last weekend. Brewing went just fine, it was something like 6 lbs. of ultralight liquid malt extract, and about a half a pound of Crystal 40L as adjunct grains. Only 0.5 oz. of Glacier (6% AA) hops were used for the boil and 1 oz. of Glacier (4.6% AA) were used for aroma so it shouldn't be very hoppy. (Indeed, it isn't, as I'll mention in the bottling part of this post.) I used Nottingham Ale dry yeast as I needed this to brew in about a week.

I then bottled it this weekend, however, I had a bit of a devilish idea as you can see below.


That's right, there's a serrano pepper in that beer. There's 13 more just like it. It's going to be quite the beer as the peppers are pretty darn hot. I steamed the peppers very briefly to try to help sanitize them and just that little time in the steam they already began to exude an intense aroma of capsaicin. I was wearing gloves the whole time while handling them (I'm not afraid of peppers, it's just part of my sanitation procedure) and figured I didn't get any residue on my hands. Well, I must have touched some residue and scratched my face at some point b/c the whole left of my face is burning a little right now.

Anyhoo, peppers aside, the beer tastes just fine (as well as a beer fresh out of the fermenter can taste) and weighs in at about 4.5% ABV. I'm really looking forward to cracking open one of those pepper beers. How apropo that I bottled this on cinco de mayo. I should call it Ale Caramba, or maybe Cinco de Mayi-yi-yi-o, I don't know.

Scotch Ale - Bottling and Tasting

It seems that I was not vigilant enough with my cooling and at some point the beer got warm enough to start producing fruity esters. It smells rather like banana, however, this is not reflected in the taste. I bottled it last weekend and so cracked open a bottle yesterday just to see how it was doing. Let's just say it needs to age for several more weeks. I don't think I'm going to try it again for another 3 weeks. Right now it's not looking so hot, but aging can do wonders for a beer, so we'll see.