Pioneer Pale Ale has come and gone!

Our first beer is Pioneer Pale Ale, an American Pale Ale. Because we are just getting started (hence “Pioneer”), we used an extract kit from Tom’s Brew Shop (http://tomsbrewshop.com/). Brewing a pale ale is our homage to our new home state of Colorado. Colorado is where Dale’s Pale Ale (Oscar Blues Brewery), Denver Pale Ale (Great Divide Brewing Co), and Silverback Pale Ale (Wynkoop Brewing Co) amplified our passion for craft beer. Love of craft beer led us to home brewing, our new frontier beer (see how the “pioneer” works again?).

The beer itself turned out pretty well – we drank the 5 gallon-ish batch in 10 days or so. Here are the stats

• Style – American Pale Ale
• Approx ABV – 4.5%
• Approx IBU – 50-ish

We learned plenty of lessons in our first batch, like straining the wort before we put it in the fermenter, measuring out the 5 gallons of liquid more carefully, and buying bags of ice to cool the wort more quickly. Frankly, we are just happy we didn’t end up with sour beer.

We’ll likely be brewing a new Pioneer Pale Ale in the winter in honor of the University of Denver ice hockey season (we’ve got lots of reasons for “pioneer” around here).

Next up is an English Special Bitter (ESB). It’s fermenting right now, so fingers crossed.

Until next time, we’ll keep trying to be Almost Native.