We left our second beer candidate in the fermenter another week to finish fermenting off before tasting. Round Two has excellent colour, but the bitterness is still a bit bold. Not bad; not undrinkable, but a bit too up front. The kind of thing that would mellow with time if we were prepared to age the beer for several months.
We decided instead to work the hopping around, and to do this we brewed two more pilot batches. The third candidate was pitched with about half of the finishing hops of the second beer and the fourth was right in the middle. We reckoned from there we would be able to make any final tweaks by trying to interpolate between the different beers.
In the end, this proved unnecessary. Craig took home the third beer and Steve took home the fourth. As we are neighbours, it was no great hardship to pop down the road for a few experimental jars. After much consideration, we both agreed - the fourth candidate was spot on - excellent. Hoppy, a lovely nut brown colour, good body.
From here, we just have to scale the beer up, which is a matter of applying some scaling factors. We use different extraction and hopping efficiencies for the commercial plant from the homebrew kit. We'll be brewing the inaugural Bad Egg next week and expect to see it released to pubs around March 30th. For those who have been patiently following the story here, we'll be releasing a homebrew version of the recipe and would be interested to compare it if anyone decides to give it a try.
