Vive Le Difference!

In order to provide a fair comparison to my first brew (West Coast Pale Ale), I went ahead and cracked open the trub bottle of Bewitched Red Ale after only a day in the fridge.  Either my brewing skills had improved dramatically from the first batch to the second, or there is quite a bit of difference in quality between these two booster packs.  My gut tells me it is the latter.


The Red Ale is still "green", but even at this stage is is exponentially better in both flavor and appearance than the WCPA.  The bottle poured out a creamy head that hung around until I finished drinking.  This is a complete contrast to the WCPA, which had very little head at this stage, and instead was fizzy like champagne.

I have the Bewitched Red Ale cold conditioning in the fridge, and the Englishman's Nut Brown Ale should be ready to bottle by the weekend.   That means I will have TWO empty LBK's at my disposal this weekend!  I am thinking that I will brew an Amber Ale in one and a Hefeweizen, (wheat beer) in the other.  I have also decided to go completely off-script and use all non-Mr. Beer ingredients for both of these batches.

I may need to address my small bottle inventory before I crank out two simultaneous batches of beer, though.  I only have 32 bottles on hand, and half of those will be taken up by the Englishman's Nut Brown for bottle conditioning when fermentation is complete on the Amber and Hefeweizen.