It's brew time

I started brewing my own beer over a year ago. Since then I have made some interesting concoctions... some really good, some really bad. So I wanted to start listing my brewing adventures on here so I remember what I did well and what I should never do again. So for now, I'm going to list my best to worst brews.

1. Pumpkin Beer - This one turned out fantastic. Definitely my favorite so far and I'm planning on brewing it again soon so it will be ready for Thanksgiving. This brew had about 2 lbs of pumpkin so next time I'm bumping it up to 4 or 6 lbs.

2. Caramel Cream Ale - One of my more interesting receipes. Had a decent amount of lactose and vanilla added. Smelled and tasted great, but vanilla flavors lessened with age. Still very good.

3. Dark Wheat Ale (Dunkleweizen) - A nice change of pace from regular wheat beers. This was dark and lots of malty flavor. Since I like malty beers, I'm listing this one high on the list.

4. Golden Ale - My first beer that I ever brewed. I don't know how this turned out well because I had no idea what I was doing. It over carbonated with age because I added too much sugar at bottling time. Other than that, this was a pretty decent beer. Amber colored and had a Bass like flavor. Brown sugar was the secret to this beer.

5. Maple Cream Ale - Not sure why I did 2 cream ales, but so far they've turned out pretty good. This one was gross when it was young, however it aged very well. After 2 months this beer was very smooth, had a great head, and had a nice maple taste. Over 12 ounces of grade A maple syrup went into this brew.

6. Irish Stout - Started out pretty good, but was a fairly dry beer with a strange aftertaste that I could never quite put my finger on. Probably too heavy on the hops since most stouts don't us much hop additions. Got really bad after it had aged a couple of months. Not my worst beer, but close.

7. Summer Ale (Hefeweizen) - Tastes pretty good, but didn't carbonate well. Added lots of lemon and orange zest, which gives it a unique aftertaste and smell. Only problem is that it fermented at too high of a temperature. The particular yeast that I used with this beer creates a banana taste if fermenting at hot temperatures. If you like bananas, then you'd like this beer.

8. Oatmeal Stout - Just about everything went wrong with this beer. Too much hops, over carbonated, didn't boil the grains correctly. It's probably the smoothest beer I've every tasted, so it gets an A+ for mouthfeel. However, the hops and carbonation issues make it pretty much undrinkable. I'll take another shot at this in the future.

Coming soon:
Pumpkin beer #2
My first IPA
and an attempt at a Watermelon Ale.