For fellow Kiwis, Lion Nathan is a classic New Zealand brewing company. It is one of the two major players on these shores, famous for its Steinlager brew and Double Brown. Or 'Dobros', as the kids call it.
So when I spied a Lion Draught malt kit sitting at The Brewhouse, and could not remember ever putting one through the drum, I did the only sensible thing. I gave it a whirl.
🍺 The kit is a starting point, not a ceiling
A malt extract kit like this one is best understood as an unfinished song. The malting and mashing have already been done for you and concentrated into a stable tin. What you do next, the enhancer, the hops, the yeast and the fermentation temperature, is where the actual beer gets made. Treat the kit as a reliable base rather than a finished product and it will pay you back every time.
Into the Drum She Went
Into a sanitised drum she went with a dose of beer enhancer. A fair bit of experience has taught me the same lesson every time. Yes, you can make a beer with a kit like this on its own, but you will want an enhancer to build body and drinkability into the finished product. Straight kit and plain white sugar gives you thin, cidery, hollow beer. A blend of dextrose, dried malt extract and a touch of maltodextrin gives you mouthfeel, a fuller palate and a head that actually lasts.
Then I added a very small amount of Fuggle hops, just some I had hiding in the fridge, more out of habit than science. The Draught kit already carries its own hop bill in the malt, with Green Bullet and Pacific Gem doing the heavy lifting, so the Fuggles were a quiet English footnote rather than the headline. If you want to steer the character properly, this is exactly where you would drop in a real hop addition instead of fridge scraps.
The drum went under some old sheets in the shed and I left it well alone for over two weeks. That patience is not optional. Pulling a brew early, before the yeast has finished the job and cleaned up after itself, is the fastest way to bottle something green and harsh. The only honest signal that fermentation is done is a hydrometer, not the calendar. Two readings a few days apart landing on the same number is your green light. Everything before that is guessing.
On a lazy Sunday morning I bottled the whole twenty-odd litres. It smelled fine in a stock-standard sense and tasted like a beer should at that stage: flat and young, but unmistakably beer.
The Review Verdict
I gave it a week in the bottle and cracked the first one.
I had made a standard beer. It was slightly dry and could obviously have done with more carbonation, which is a conditioning issue rather than a fault of the kit. A couple of weeks later I chilled a few in the fridge overnight and opened one after a very nice lasagne.
It went down well.
As you might have suspected, the Lion Brown came out as a malty beer, nice and golden. It is nothing fancy. But it is a half-decent drop for a kit that costs less than twenty bucks, and that value equation is the entire point of kit brewing.
Lion Brown / Lion Draught Malt Kit
Style: Draught-style golden lager
Price: Under $20 NZD
Character: Malty, golden, clean, a touch dry
Needs: An enhancer for body, and enough conditioning time to carbonate properly
Best used for: A dependable malt backbone for a speciality-grain batch
Verdict: Nothing fancy, but honest value and a genuinely useful blank canvas.
Where This Kit Really Shines
Here is where the Lion Brown kit earns its keep. It is not the beer to reach for when you want a showpiece straight from the tin. It is the beer to reach for when you want to boil up a batch and let speciality grains do the talking. Steep a bag of crystal or a little chocolate malt, run a proper hop addition, pitch a characterful yeast, and use the kit purely as a clean malt backbone. In that role, where you want the grains to dictate the flavour outcome rather than the malt kit itself, it is close to ideal. Cheap, dependable, and happy to get out of the way while your own additions take the credit.
More Kit Reviews Worth Reading
If you are weighing up your next lager brew, these four reviews from the kit reviews library cover the full range, from the budget staple to the premium pilsner to the fresh wort format that gets closest to all grain.
Coopers Lager Beer Kit Review, Any Good?
One of the most widely available lager kits on the planet, brewed straight and then nudged upward with a few cheap, specific tweaks. A good honest benchmark for what a budget lager kit can and cannot do.
WilliamsWarn 'Bohemian' Pilsner Kit Review
A premium kit built to chase the classic Czech pilsner. Saaz hop character, a crisp malt spine, and the water chemistry notes that separate a good pilsner from a great one.
Te Aro 'Obligatory' Fresh Wort Kit Review
The next rung up from concentrated extract: fresh, fully hopped wort from a commercial brewery, sealed for you to ferment at home. About as close as a kit gets to an all-grain result.
Lager Kit, Riwaka Hops and Golden Syrup Experiment
Where kit brewing turns into cooking. A plain lager base transformed with New Zealand Riwaka hops and a golden syrup addition. Proof that a cheap tin is only ever the first draft.
