All in all, a well attended and fun event with lots of good company and beer. We event tried some home made wine as well as Moe’s ice wine which was a tad sweet for me but the missus would have enjoyed it. The only let down was the food – too little variety and lots of it ran out half way thru the event. Good thing there were some gourmet sausages thrown on the barbie to make up the for the slack.

Well done to Raymond and his team plus lots of volunteers and tireless homebrew fans for making this event possible. Looking forward to next year’s. I think a good idea would be to have the Coopers starter kits for sale as the event so sideline and couch brewers can get into the action without any excuses of ‘I dunno where to get one’.

It finally happened

Raymond Lee, owner of iBrew and organiser of iBrew Challenge

Where the magic gets dispensed - the beer tent. I love Moehadi's Conkerwood stout and IPA. And then there was the IPA from Tap 1 which I also adored.

Great weather - slightly overcast. Not too warm.

Fal Allen (left) of Archipelago Brewery talked about ‘Craft Beer in Asia’

Beer drinking challenge - Andre (right) sucking it down. No, his team didn't win.

Neither did my team but the speed chug left big wet beer stains on my 'To The Pub' tee shirt. What's more important is we made new friends - Tian Peng (right). Andre - what's our friend's name, the one wearing the same T-shirt as you?'Beer is the Answer. Now what was the question?'

Women beer lovers in solidarity with their male beer drinking competition team mates

...and our fairer sex were chugging it down as fast as any man there...

... and chugging it down some more...

Homebrew entries submitted for judging

Judges including Ernest Ng from RedDot BrewHouse (left) doing their thing. Ernest earlier gave a talk on brewing Weizen

Who wants more beer? ME!

New beer bottled - imprisoned in easy to store PET bottles

Clear golden nectar - blurness is due to the plastic SG measurement cylinder

Folks, last Sunday was a new chapter in Derrick’s Annals of Drinks History. I brewed my first batch of summer beer. So what’s the big hesitation in the past? Well, I only brewed beer during the cooler months on Nov/Dec cos I though that its be easier to regulate the temperature to a brew-friendly 28 deg or so during this rainy season in Singapore.

But now that the weather is so DARN HOT and I feel I don’t get enough practice to hone my brewing skills, I thought that I’d try a summer brew. Afterall, don’t we all love a crisp cold one in the heat? So what’s stopping me from attempting to make my own and crossing my fingers our hardworking yeasty friends don’t fall into a summer slumber?

Climate's been warm at about 31 deg

So I trooped down to my local brew ingredient supplier to get TWO batches of ingredients so I can make TWO consequtive batchs (different flavours) this second half of the year – Australian Bitter and Sparkling Ale – both from the Coopers Premium series.

Sparkling Ale ingredients

Australian Bitter ingredients

I did the beer dance while I  mixed up the ingredients with one hand and sanitised my kit with the other, using up lots of hot water and ice in the process, in a bid to achieve the optimal temperature for the wort and yeast before filling the whole batch in the tank. Saying a quick prayer, I sealed the contents and left it in a cool dark area of the home. I also checked for the specific gravity (SG) reading (1060) and fermentation activity in the hours that passed – phew, a scum layer greeted me about twelve hours after sealing. So all that was last Sunday.

The tank

Fast forward one week (or so) to this Sunday and I was all ready to bottle the young fermented beer. With much trepidation, I again checked the SG reading and was relieved that it read 1010. This means two things: that fermentation indeed took place in the last seven days and the wort was converted to alcoholic beer and that my beer would be a pretty strong 7.2% ABV. Woot!!!! Reason for my elation is that my previous batch of wheat beer last Dec turned out much lighter than I expected. A bit of a bummer though the taste was excellent.

Clear golden nectar - blurness is due to plastic SG measurement cylinder

One of the fun bits of the bottling process is that I get to sample a taste of the week old beer – after measuring the SG in the hydrometer’s plastic cylinder housing.  And I must say that I am elated – the taste is clean (even though its straight from the tank and not chilled), full-bodied, higher than normal ABV strength of course, and the colour is clear golden with fine  bubbles.

So after sanitising the PET bottles, I proceeded to pop two carbonation drops into each 740ml bottle before filling them with the liquid gold. I cannot explain the feeling of this process. The anticipation of savouring the matured brew after another two weeks is almost too much to bear!

Specific gravity of 1010

I’ll be posting another report on how the final taste is like after another two weeks of secondary bottle maturation. Stay tuned!

P.S. I almost forgot to mention as one of the taste notes that this batch of Australian Bitter is as its name suggested – more hoppy than most regular beers. But I love bitter beer. I can’t drink too much wheat or fruit beers (not a fan anyway). So if you’re a Hoe kinda drinker, you may not take to this much.

Draining the tank