My First Brews

So I've made five beers so far, two batches of NB's White House Honey Porter, one batch of a recipe I modified from the web that was supposed to be a clone of Anderson's Summer Solstice, NB's Brickwarmer Red, and NB's Number 8. These were all extract brews and I have no intention of even trying all grain at this point as that is one more variable I'm not ready to tackle yet aside from the fact that I don't have the equipment do so even if I wanted to. The Brickwarmer and Number 8 are currently fermenting and the others have been bottled and consumed.

The learning curve has really been quite painless for me as every beer I've made has turned out really good. I don't think that making good beer is hard at all. If you sanitize well and follow some basic guidelines your beer will turn out fine every time. I am learning though that refining my processes can make for great beers. Most recently I've learned the importance of controlling fermentation temperatures. This is particularly true in monastic type beers where esters are necessary to contribute to the ultimate flavor of the beer. So ester (esters are created when your beer heats up during fermentation when proteins attach themselves to the alcohol...or something like that) production is a little tricky as you really need to maintain a specific temperature range. Esters are are just one of the refinements that I'll be working on.

I have made one of my own recipes based on a clone recipe for Anderson's Summer Solstice that I found on the web. When I first brewed this beer I thought it was a real disaster although after time it turned out very tasty although admittedly nothing like the Summer Solstice I was trying to replicate.
The recipe I found at http://youcanbrewit.com/ was as follows:

3/4 lb Crystal (40L)
3/4 lb Crystal (80L)
Steep at 150°F for 30 minutes
Boil 60 Minutes
3.3 lbs of Briess Golden Light Liquid Extract
3 lbs of Briess Golden Light Dry Extract
1/2 oz Cascade last 15 minutes
Wyeast 2112

I wonder how this would have come out if I had followed the original recipe, I honestly don't have a lot of confidence that it would be any closer to Summer Solstice than what I made. What I did was:

3/4 lb Crystal (40L)
3/4 lb Crystal (80L)
Steep at 170°F for 30 minutes
Boil 60 Minutes
6.6 lbs of Briess Golden Light Liquid Extract
1 lbs of Briess Golden Light Dry Extract
1 lbs of Clear Candi Sugar
1/2 oz Cascade last 15 minutes
Wyeast 2112

So what I didn't know about this recipe was that this yeast is a special lager type yeast that ferments at ale type temperatures. I only fermented it for one week in the primary and one week in the secondary which worked really well for my White House Honey Porter which was the only beer I'd made previously. I also changed the extract to mostly liquid with a little dry but proportionally speaking it was  very close to what the recipe called for. I also added the candi sugar which should have only added some extra gravity with no big changes in flavor. What I ended up with was nothing like Summer Solstice but it was still pretty good. I really wanted that light caramel flavor but didn't really get that at all. The beer ended up being a caramel colored flavorful lager. Since I had not fermented it long enough most of the secondary phase happened in the bottle there was a considerable amount of sediment in each bottle. Over all though the beer was very drinkable and a big hit with my friends and also a great leaning experience.