Hobo's Delight

As the regular reader of my blog will recall I was brewing a six gallon batch of beer two weekends ago, and bottling it last weekend, on Sunday, to be precise. Since then it has been sitting on a shelf, all 63 bottles of it, aging and maturing. I figure most of the development will happen within 20 days, so that long I ought to leave it alone before judging and drinking it.

Except, 20 days is a very long time to look at beer and not drinking it. So I decided three of the 63 bottles would volunteer to go early, as a preview; one going after five days, the next after ten, the last after 15. Well, it is day five today, and with the day's chores behind me, I decided it was time to test the first bottle.

While I opened that first bottle carefully over the sink (which proved unnecessary as there is very little fizz yet) I also decided my home brewed beer needed a name. And given that me expressed goal was to develop a recipe that is both cheap (no more than $3 per six pack) and good (tastes like beer at least twice that much) there beer practically named itself: I am proud to introduce Hobo's Delight, the beer of the penniless, the beer of people with a life too precious to waste on work and bad beer.

I have not made a formal taste test and I won't until the 20 days of aging are over. However, that won't stop me from making a preliminary assessment right now: I have a winner at my hands! Sure, the beer is still flat but it will get a lot livelier with some more aging. There is not much of a hop aroma; but that will either fix itself over the next 15 days, or I will know how to fix that during the brewing process in the future.

But the malt flavor and mouth feel if just unbelievable, it just about blew me away. It's been five days and already I can think of kinds of beer that tastes worse but costs twice as much in the store. And the beer has a definite kick, too: I just finished that first bottle and I already have a slight buzz! I am sure hobos everywhere will appreciate that in particular! 

Of course there has to be some bad news to mitigate on all that joy: There won't be another one of these for the next five days ---