Why does homebrew taste better

You just have to be patient and have some bottles for "sample tastes" - taste them after month, two, three and you will know when is the best time to drink it or give it to friends.

All big industry breweries are bottling it after weeks after brewing, so no surprise it tastes like crap. Give it a time and you will be surprised how sometimes potentially bad beer can become one of the best after some time.

The aroma during bottling was quite promising, but the first bottle sampled some days later was But, I did tell myself to keep expectations low. Friends told me it was pretty good, so maybe I was just being too critical. I had another bottle of it last night, and it definitely seemed nicer, which has been the general trend of impressions myself, my wife, my friends since that first bottle.

That's about 5 weeks in the bottle. Also check out this link; scroll down to the discussion under Maturing. That said, I've read that if you go the keggle route, the "best before" date seems to be 60 days after kegging. I'm unclear as to why this is.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why do all my beers taste better after having aged for a couple months?

Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 10 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed 33k times. Improve this question. Nick Nick 1, 2 2 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 15 15 bronze badges. Good thing to remember is that hop character also mellows with age. So if you brewed a super hoppy beer it will taste hoppier earlier and then mellow out to a different beer by the last bottle. I've had beer that sat in a carboy for upto a year and they tasted fine.

You'll see a darkening of the beer, so that shouldn't be a shock. I've actually yet to produce a beer as light in colour as those commercially available, so I'm not concerned. Ultimately, there is the expedience of producing your own beer, acquiring the characteristics you are looking for maltiness, dry hopped flavour, etc I aren't too many recipes that doesn't have you bottling after 2 weeks.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. TinCoyote TinCoyote 3, 15 15 silver badges 23 23 bronze badges. Interestingly, my own beers have all both been substantially better after aging for a year. Course I only have one bottle left by then. It is absolutely possible for your homebrew to taste like professional brews.

Homebrews have been made so good that breweries have picked up the product for mass production. Many craft breweries in the world also have roots in home brewing , where the freedom to create and experiment led to new ideas within the brewing industry. We know of at least one group of people over in France and the UK that have even managed to make professional tasting beer using only supermarket ingredients! Brewing is a skill that takes practice, patience, and unfortunately probably one or two failures.

So how do you get your home brew to taste as good as possible? First off, it is very important to judge your home brew fairly. Knowing the essentials of beer tasting will help you get an objective eye so you can not only say if you think your beer tastes good, but why it tastes good, and how it differs from a professional craft beer. Tips and tricks for better tasting home brew beer. Water treatment is a pretty advanced topic and takes some practice to understand. If you cook, you understand how salt enhances flavor and gives body to food.

Salt does the same thing to beer. We salt our beers to highlight complex flavors and nuances. The two big minerals brewers focus on are sulfates and chlorides. Calcium sulfate gypsum tends to promote drier, crisper, more hop-forward beers, while calcium chloride tends to promote fuller, sweeter, softer, and more malt-forward beers. Here is a really good overview for learning more about brewing water in a little more detail. I would recommend anyone trying to perfect their brews to get a detailed water report from Ward Labs so you understand the mineral makeup of your source water.

If your water sucks, you can buy RO water and start from scratch. Understanding your water is also going to help you dial in your mash pH as well.

Experiment with adding salts and see what you like. See how different levels of sulfates and chlorides impact your beer. To get a feel for it, you can experiment with adding very small amounts to a glass of finished beer and see how it impacts overall taste. This is why they take pharmaceutical-grade cleaning practices to clean equipment.

While this may be overkill to you, the homebrewer, it produces phenomenal consistent results for pro brewers. Improperly cleaned cold side equipment can slowly degrade your product over time. It may not present itself in batch 1 or 2, but it may start to slowly show up in batch 3 or 4. While mine certainly held its own, I noticed the commercial examples smelled cleaner and crisper. This could be a lot of things even just the yeast choice or mineral makeup , but for whatever reason, my beer smelled a little like my fermenter.

Maybe I could have done a better job cleaning it? Rinsing stuff with water only is not cleaning, even if it looks clean. Sanitizing equipment without properly cleaning will also do you no good. Invest in a high-quality alkaline-based brewery wash and do long hot soaks of all equipment in between batches.

I switched over all of my equipment to stainless and eliminated as much plastic as possible. I also like to use a few different forms of sanitizers.

Star San is a very common acid-based cleaner that works well against most contaminants in the brewery. When it comes to sanitizing my fermenter, I like to use a no-rinse iodine-based sanitizer.

Iodine sanitizers , used in the proper dosing, can be used as a non-foaming, no-rinse sanitizer. It works better against killing yeast, mold, bacteria, bugs, you name it. Just to reiterate, sanitizer does not replace cleaners. Ingredients are incredibly important when it comes to producing great beer.

That being said, you can toss it all out of the window without proper technique. In my opinion, extract brewing will only get you so far with certain styles. A lot of homebrewers swear extract has a very specific taste. I tend to agree to some extent but it can be hard to pinpoint.

All grain brewing will give you the same level of control and access to brewing ingredients as commercial brewers. You can use all of your extract equipment and only need to invest in a high-quality grain bag! Outside of that, I would encourage you to look at Yakima Valley Hops for hop selection. In my opinion, these guys make the best hops and I trust the quality more when I buy direct.