Yup, it looks like my next two brews will be the Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale by popular demand! Seems that a lot of my friends just love the taste of this kit.  I myself thinks that the taste is quite okay but it is nothing spectacular. Sure, it is easy to drink and extremely refreshing but I guess I am a little bit choosy. I like my beers with more flavour and most importantly, body. It is not to say I don’t like light beers, in actual fact I love light beers. I enjoy a glass of Carlsberg as anyone else (in Singapore) but after drinking craft beers, I know that I am missing out on a lot of other great tasting beers.You could say that I have higher taste for beer? Hahahaha!

Anyways, the next brew recipe will be pretty standard. The Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale Beer Ingredient Kit and the Cooper’s Beer Enhancer 2 (BE2) plus a little Pride of Ringwood hops for flavouring. Either that or some Cascade hops. You can never go wrong with Cascades in Ales. The problem with this is that I need to add some malt extract first before I can add the hops. It has something to do with the hops extraction thingy. The Cooper’s Beer Enhancer 2 is a mix of dextrose, Malto-dextrin and Light Dry Malt Extract. So I am afraid that the sugars will darken too much if I add the BE2 in the beginning of the boil. I don’t want a darker colour for my beer if I could help it. Everyone complains and whines when the beer turns up dark and sometimes it really gets on my nerves. Anyways, I think I will just do a 10 minutes boil with about half the BE2 added at the beginning of the boil and the rest at the end of the boil. Something like the late malt extract addition concept.

And one of the other complains of the Australian Pale Ale I had done was that it was weak and lacks the kick. I thought I got a alcohol content of about 3% but apparently it is still quite low for my friends. I am wondering whether to add 2 packs of BE2 into the brew instead of just one. Or I could possibly add in another 500g of light malt extract? However, adding the malt extract could dilute the flavour from the beer ingredient kit, so I am at odds. I am also thinking of topping up with less water so that the alcoholic content would increase without losing any of the flavours or bitterness. Well, we will see how.