More Beer!

If you have not noticed, beer is a recurring theme on my blog lately. Well, what can I say. I've got a new hobby. I'm a kid in a candy store. I'm the proverbial happy pig in the mud! And guess what? this is gonna be another post about BEER.
The Marquise and I bottled our second batch of beer last night. Everything went a lot smoother than last time. We got a bottle filler from the store and that helped tremendously. What a great invention. It is basically a long tube with a spring loaded valve at one end. You connect the free end to the bucket-o-beer with tubing and insert the other end into the beer bottle. You press the spring down against the bottom of the bottle and the valve opens up and fills the bottle up with beer. When the bottle is full, you just lift up the contraption and the beer flow stops. Wonderful!!!!
We did make a couple of changes to the beer this time around. Instead of using raw cane sugar, we used corn sugar. It is really interesting the difference in taste between the two sugars. The cane sugar mixture was a lot sweeter and the beer foamed up a lot more. The cane sugar produced a beer that had a slight "cidery" taste to it. The corn sugar is a lot mellower and there was almost no foaming during the bottling. I guess that is actually the way it is supposed to be, but so far, with the preliminary tasting, I think I liked the cane sugar a little better. I'll give a final review when the new beer is ready (about 3 weeks).
Now for any beer purists out there, yes, I know beer is not supposed to have sugar added to it. But, give us a break we are just starting out here. The Marquise and I decided to start out simple and easy. We wanted to get a couple of batches under our belts before we started on the more complicated recipes. I have already picked out another type of beer mix to try, so we will probably stay with the KISS method for the next batch also and then gradually get more complicated. Hopefully more complicated will equal better beer (even outstanding beer, maybe). I think our next step will be to substitute malt extract for the corn sugar. The question with that is what type of malt extract do we use and how much?