Brewed for Christmas, this clone of Summer Lightning (Hopback Brewery), I made weighing in at 5.2% was clear and pale and not bad tasting given the first time I have brewed for a few years! I kegged some in a King Keg and the remainder in a plastic poly thingy!
The seal seemed to have been leaking on the King Keg and various attempts at tightening this didn’t seem to work. The plastic poly though was good and the beer from that was okay but not one of my best. Drinkable – maybe a 7/10.
I then purchased a corny keg from The Happy Brewer at Roxton Garden Centre and added the beer to that and added CO2. It’s now waiting until February as I’m doing Dry January! They say to leave beer for a few weeks and the best beer is usually the final few pints – we’ll have to see!
I have since bought a wifi Inkbird and a fridge where I’ll be able to ferment the beer more consistently as the last lot was fermented in the fluctuating temperature of the kitchen. The inkbird is a device you plug a heating device and a cooling device (fridge) into and when the temperature reaches too high or too low the appropriate device kicks in to regulate the fermentation temperature and this is said to be a critical part of brewing good beer – again we’ll see in the next brew…..which is going to be a London Pride clone to be brewed towards the end of February. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Okay, I changed my mind. Due to using new untested equipment I decided to do a kit beer so that if it went wrong I wouldn’t have invested too much time or money into it.
Wow! The kit beer I chose was Woodfordes Wherry which has had good reviews by others and the real stuff ain’t too bad either. The new equipment did it’s job well except on occasions the inkbird alarm on my phone waking me up to let me know the beer had got to minimum temperature and the heater was now kicking in. The beer itself was fantastic – really tasted like the real thing. I bought another corny keg and used that as the other was still in use. This will allow me to have a couple of beers on the go at a time 🙂