A question from the wife.....

Try a wheat beer. Every female loves a light wheat beer.

 

My girlfriend likes La Fin Du Monde too lol I would say any wheat, wit or red/Amber. Have her look over the styles and the expected flavor profiles to pick which one sounds good to her.

 

I never had Michelob Ultra Amber, but will imagine it to be something like a watery version of a Vienna lager. Since you are new to the hobby you might not be up for brewing lagers, but you could try to do an altbier or American amber ale recipe, in which you lower the hop bitterness. Look at the Ferocious recipe you brewed as an example of what your wife finds too bitter and cut the bittering hops in half. You might even try to brew the same kit but reduce the bittering hop load. According to the online instructions for the kit, 1 oz of warrior is added at 60 min. You could try halving that amount or you could try using a different bittering hop with about half the alpha acid content. Maybe Mt Hood or Northern Brewer.

 

@pweis909 raised a good point. I've never had this beer, nor Michelob Ultra Amber, but an ounce of Warrior at 60 is going to add a lot of bitterness without any flavor. For reference, I have an 87 Ibu Double IPA (OG 1.077) that uses .66 oz of Warrior at 60. Granted, it has a lot of late addition hops that add to the bitterness, but in your recipe, over 50% of the apparent bitterness is coming without the balance of additional hop flavoring. That's a lot of bite.

I think cutting the bittering charge in half is a great starting point. If you buy the kit again, just use half of the Warrior and save the extra half ounce for another batch. I've used it nearly exclusively as a my bittering hop for almost two years - it keeps a long time in the freezer and does the trick.

 

I don't know if you're up to brewing lagers which is what Michelle Ultra Amber is. My suggestion is to visit your local brewpub and get a sampler flight or a brewfest and sample a number of different ales and find the styles she likes. I suspect it will be American Blonde/Amber/Brown or English Pale/Brown/Porter.

 

My wife turned the corner with brown ales.

 

I've done a pale ale that my life really liked. Obviously that's a broad category. And then a simple Blonde that she really liked.

 

A lot of people here have suggested what females typically like to drink. I am not going to argue with any of those suggestions, but I don't really see why any of them are necessarily useful in the present case. You are not trying to brew a beer for some women's group. You want to brew a beer that your wife will enjoy. To this end I suggest that you go to the local beer emporium with your wife, buy a bunch of potentially likable craft beers (where potential likability is judged by the info on the labels and her preferences to this point). Drink up and then figure out what she likes. Then brew a clone or at least a beer in the same style category. Cheers!

 

Wheat beers

 

I brew a Cream Ale with Czech Saaz hops that my macro drinking friends typically like.

 

a lot of people tend to compartmentalize: beer = light adjunct american lagers and anything else doesn't seem like beer. So, one way around that is to do totally different not similar stuff.
My good female best friend doesn't drink beer. period. She likes her pineapple and malibu, but through me, she now likes 1 beer, Kasteel rouge, a belgian oud brun aged on cherries with cherry liquor.
my dad wasn't really going the craft route, you know what switched him over? Coffee russian imperial stouts!
so, the question for you is, what other beverages does she like? Is she a coffee/espresso drinker? if yes, consider going with a coffee something or other. Is she into fruit mixed drinks, etc. consider a fruit beer. But, don't be lame and offer her a fruit flavored blonde, you're not fooling anybody you know. Chocolate/milk? consider a milk stout aged with cocoa nibs.

 

As an aside on brewing girly beers... I brewed a jasmine lavender monstrosity that got renamed medea (cough, greek goddess, poisoner, child killer). It was the most bitter thing ever, and it wasn't hop bitterness, it was just massive herb bitterness that was unpleasant. I brewed the plain beer style and diluted the hell out of medea until it was pallatable. I entered the full strength medea in a homebrew contest for worst beer ever, and it was 2nd worst of 2 beers. So....

 

Sounds like it needed some rose in there too


I agree with @utahbeerdude & @Reneejane, I would go out to a store that has a wide range, and try to pick a combination of beers that she thinks sounds interesting, as well as a few from left field that wouldn't normally be on the radar.