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Thanks guys for the valuable information I picked up from the different discussions on the site. With my first batch bottled (and waiting patiently at home for me) I am going to put on 1 more Festa blonde lager kit, oxygenate it better and leave it in the primary for an extra day just to see if there is any difference. I got an FG of 1008 so I guess thats as good as it gets.

Would anyone recommend adding hops or doing anything else to the Festa brew kits or is it best left alone?

Awesome! Glad to hear. Next time you are in the big city, you'll have to let us know so we can meet up, maybe exchange some bottles of homebrew.

As for tweaking the Festa Brews, I say go for it! If you feel they are a bit lacking in hop aroma, dry hop it (I think the ESB actually comes with some hops for the purpose). You could even do a micro-mash to add to the wort, if you were looking for different character from the base. Once you start doing lots of different things to them, I'd say you are definitely better off doing a partial or full mash, and have supreme control over everything.

Once again, glad to hear the good news.

The blonde is a lager and the yeast the kit comes with is best fermented at 12degrees Celsiuses. Which is from the yeast datasheet. They put the same damn instructions in all the festa kits no matter if they are a lager or not. I've fermented it at 20 the first time around and got down to 15 the second batch. Not a huge difference, the second batch tasted pretty bland along side the double oatmeal stout and the red. I didn't have any of the first batch to compare it to. All that said the beer might be gaining some good flavors from the esters produced in the warm fermentation as its very bland to start with.

I didn't use the instructions from the box. The guy at noble grape gave me different instructions and with a bit of info from the Homebrewing for Dummies book I hoped for the best. Even though it is a lager kit the noble instructions stated to leave it work at 68-70 degrees which I thought was high. The temp on the side of the bucket read 66-67 every time I looked at it and I just left it be.
I didn't get to try the beer yet but the stuff I spilled in my bottling tray tasted alright (a bit flat) but I wouldn't want to drink much of it.

It settled out nicely and I'll get to try it next weekend.

chalmers wrote:Awesome! Glad to hear. Next time you are in the big city, you'll have to let us know so we can meet up, maybe exchange some bottles of homebrew.

As for tweaking the Festa Brews, I say go for it! If you feel they are a bit lacking in hop aroma, dry hop it (I think the ESB actually comes with some hops for the purpose). You could even do a micro-mash to add to the wort, if you were looking for different character from the base. Once you start doing lots of different things to them, I'd say you are definitely better off doing a partial or full mash, and have supreme control over everything.

Once again, glad to hear the good news.

Thanks for the offer chalmers.

I'll take you up on the offer this summer once I think I have something worth offering to someone else. I wouldn't want to give anyone fizzy bog water.

I'm going to do another festa kit to compare to the first and an extract brew the same day since I'll already have the kitchen in a state.

eastcoast wrote:Even though it is a lager kit the noble instructions stated to leave it work at 68-70 degrees which I thought was high.

High?! The person who gave you those instructions was high, I'll tell you that. Just kidding, stoners make way more sense....