A couple weeks ago I posted about making beer from barley I'd malted. It seems to have worked out well enough, since I went through the usual brewing process with it, stuck the resulting wort (the name for the liquid that, when fermented, becomes beer) into a carboy, added some yeast, and watched it ferment out in three days. I bottled it last Monday, and tonight I cracked one open.
Bottle conditioning - the process by which residual yeast ferments a small amount of sugar inside a bottle to provide natural carbonation - usually takes two weeks, sometimes longer if you want the beer to clear well. I didn’t feel like waiting, so I opened one now. It tastes surprisingly good, but it has yet to develop many bubbles, so for the moment I'm thinking of it as a very lightly carbonated real ale, which I’ve always enjoyed.
-Garth