Coop’s Red Ale – Homebrew Review

I have a friend who is taking a real interest in homebrewing and recently just brewed up his first batch. So in our conversations, I had a few small gaskets that could make his life easier and  his wife happier (Leaky gaskets = sticky beer fermentation on the floor = angry wife) I learned this the hard way myself, when one of my first brews blew up all over the counter on down onto the floor, but anyway. So I stopped by to drop off the gaskets and was lucky enough to snag two bottles of his first brew. So after getting some permission, I figured I would give him some proper feedback and post this review. So here we go:

Here she is in all of her glory. From the picture alone you can tell that it poured with a generous head and it finally dissipated down to this. On with the review.

APPEARANCE: Nice full slightly off white head. Color is a nice copper, with slight red highlights when held up to the light. The clarity is pretty hazy almost like a wheat beer.

AROMA: Some fruity esters, I smell some orchard notes, maybe apple and some pear.

TASTE: It has good mouthfeel. It is very soft and light on the palate, but there is some sweetness that coats your tongue. Once the initial sweetness clears it gives way to some slight caramel and biscuit flavors from the malt and some bitterness from all of the CO2 that keeps bubbling through it.

OVERALL: This is a good beer, much better than my first attempt. It is very drinkable and light enough where I’m going to break into the second bottle after I’m done writing this. It does have some room to be improved to take it from a good intro beer to a great everyday drinking beer. These are just my opinions and suggestions, so take them for what they are worth. I think that the beer wasn’t completely done fermenting and that’s where a lot of the sweetness is coming from. That also accounts for a lot of the CO2 that it is still producing and the haziness. This would be my only suggestion, that instead of bottling it so soon, I would transfer it to a secondary fermenter for 4 – 6 days to make sure that the fermentation is completely finished, then bottle it. This extra time fermenting would give the yeast a little more time to eat up some of the sugar and make it a little less sweet and a better rounded beer. This extra time would also help with the clarity of the beer as more of the sediment would drop out and the beer would be clearer at the time of bottling. But even these things are very minor things and easy to fix, but even if they weren’t fixed this beer is still a damn good beer and I would drink it over a bunch of others that are commercially produced.

If I had to give this beer a grade I would easily give it B-. That is not bad at all for a first attempt. So you can only go up from here. Keep brewing. Awesome!