Two year old homebrew

Over two years ago I brewed a pale mild to a 1950s recipe. I didn’t like it much at the time, as it was very honeyish and a bit sickly. Visiting my mum last week I came across a left over bottle of the stuff.

Opened it up, fearing it would gush, but it didn’t. Whew, I calculated my priming sugar all right then. It was a bit spritzy, but not over-carbonated. It had the strong Ribena aroma of heavily oxidised homebrew, which I was expecting. It also had a very nice head, and is bright orange, which I wasn’t expecting.

Tasting it, it’s bone dry and rather reminiscent of Orval. Not as good as Orval, obviously, but in the same kind of style.  At the time my house yeast was Worthington White Shield yeast, which dries every beer out, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.

I still poured most of it away, but it was interesting to see the effect of time on a beer.

Tasting my first two all-grain brews

Unfortunately my Broken Scales Guesswork Ale developed a thin layer of mould on top. I went ahead and bottled it anyway and I seem to have added a goodly amount of sugar, as it's well carbonated after less than a week. It tastes strange, but not bad. It has sort of creamy, vanilla-y flavours and a little bit of hot alcohol, although that may be me projecting and associating the vanilla with whisky. It's very full in body, perhaps I was mashing too hot after all. Because I know it has Bramling Cross hops in it, which are notorious for blackcurrant aroma, I wonder if what I called vanilla is actually the hops.

Meanwhile, Pale Ale with Hops and Dimethyl Sulfide is calming down; it's drinkable if heavily chilled. I'm in two minds as to whether to drink it up and get rid of it, or push it to the back of the shelf and see if it gets any nicer.