Yesterday I tasted both of my brews. Batch 1 was brewed on 9/27, batch 2 was brewed on 10/3. Batch 1 being the first brew I ever made is still grainy and cloudy but drinkable. I’ve seen posts by new homebrewers who often discard their first few beers because they don’t think they’ll be “good enough” to keg or bottle. I plan on being patient, even with my first batch where I made some many mistakes while making it. I still think the cloudiness will subside over time once I bottle the beer.
My 2nd batch which has been in the primary for a little over a week tastes much better and has no cloudiness at all. There is no grainy taste to it at all and the hop flavor is very well balanced. Yes, I have to confess I did a bit of “continuous hand-hopping” for about 30 minutes, adding one cone at a time to the brew pot. The lack of cloudiness is probably related to the fact that I used Irish moss in this batch (I forgot to use it in batch 1).
The 2nd batch overall is a cleaner beer, thanks to extended Vorlaufing and filtering of the beer before I moved it into the fermenter. I moved both beers from the Primary into a bottling carboy as I’ll be bottling both beers this weekend while Batch 3 is brewing! Oh this is fun, fun, fun!
