Gnome brewed a New Year’s Eve Maize Beer and tonight we have decided to do a formal tasting:

Colour is dark amber and very effervescent; small sized bubbles with excessive fizz.  Clear with good head.

Smells like the first whiff when you open up a can of sweetcorn.  Also, reminiscent of fermenting apples and it definitely smells sour.

With the first sip, there is an immediate sweetness then a sourness; it is foamy like champagne.  It tastes like a sour beer; unusual tasting and not your typical beer-like taste.

We squeezed the juice of a fresh lemon into it to see if this would improve the taste; we found that it gave it an overall smoother and well-rounded taste.  It helped to balance the sweet and sour components.  More drinkable with lemon juice.

It feels like it needs a fruity taste to round off the sourness..like pineapple, peach or strawberry.  Next time, Gnome will add fruit to the maize beer.

This beer was in fact tasted unofficially at Day 7 and it was a  disappointment at this stage as it tasted sour and “vomit-like.”  With age, it seems to have mellowed out and even although it has a sharp sourness, it has become palatable and drinkable.  We can see that it would benefit  from waiting a full 12 months before consuming.

Overall, we are very pleased with this tasting because we did not feel that it was up to our drinking standards at an early stage but there has been considerable improvement over time.

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