Surprise Bottle of Alpha Attack APA Pleases Palates

At today's holiday dinner at my wife's parents' house, my father-in-law shocked me by producing a bottle of my very first batch of homebrewed beer from his basement refrigerator.

Inside this unassuming brown glass bottle, marked on the cap simply as "#1", lay my very first attempt at brewing: an all-grain American-style Pale Ale with Cascade and Chinook hops.

This beer was brewed in October of 2005. I used this beer as sort of a trial run since I had no practical experience with either my equipment or the brewing process at the time.

When fermentation and packaging was complete back at the end of 2005, we actually ended up with a fairly decent beer. On the malt side it was lightly sweet with a crisp dry finish but the bitterness from the hops was overstated with a lingering harshness much more suited to a crazy-assed DIPA.

The beer became known as "Alpha Attack" both because it was my first ever batch and because of the onslaught of hop alpha acid that came from drinking it.

I had until today believed that there were no more bottles of Alpha Attack in existence. To my knowledge the final bottles had been consumed at my birthday party almost an entire year ago.

My first thought on seeing that bottle today was how completely horrible the beer inside was going to be. I would expect a homebrewed Pale Ale that was over a year-and-a-half-old to be completely ruined.

What I found instead was a very pleasing beer, still heavy on the bitter and with a more subdued hop nose, but the flavor was spot-on for the style. And the presentation was excellent, with clear, bright color, no hazing, and the intact carbonation fueling a nice white head.

This was a very nice surprise. I was proud to see that this humble beer had survived its journey and in some ways even improved with time.

Happy Easter, Cheers!

Follow this link for more information on Alpha Attack including the original ProMash recipe.