Black Rock Nut Brown Ale Beer Kit Review 2020

After my successful crack at a bohemian pilsner, I turned m y 'beer goggles' to Black Rock’s ‘Nut Brown Ale’ beer kit. 

Like WilliamsWarn beer kits, it also made in the famous New Zealand Speights Brewery.

The kit is pitched by Black Rock as a “malty, deep amber coloured beer with a balanced harmony of crystal malt and hops to create a notably clean taste with a malt accented flavour.”

So shall we see if what I brew gets anywhere near that carefully crafted piece of PR spin?

The preparation of this beer is very standard

Sanitize your gear thoroughly.

Add the kit and a beer enhancer. You will certainly need an enhancer else, your ale will be too thin and have a poor mouth feel.

After pre-hydrating it, I added the bog standard brewing yeast that comes with the kit. I understand that every yeast packet from the Black Rock contains the same yeast which they call ‘Premium Dry Brewing Yeast Sachet’.

I could have got a yeast that was more properly matched to make an ale (such as maybe the Nottingham) but I’m keen to see what the kit delivers.

And now I did something a little hypocritical.

While the Nut Brown Ale kit comes with green bullet and pacific gem hops, I added goldings hops to add a lil bit of delight. The key thing for this beer is that it should be fairly light on hops so as to not over bitter your beer.

Then I wrapped the fermenter in sheets and left it in the shed for 9 days where it bubbled away quite nicely.

Let’s talk about this kind of beer for a moment.

The Brown Ale style initially gained popularity in the down and dirty pubs of England, where beer guzzlers expressed a need for beer that was both flavorful and complex but at the same time mild enough to be a session beer.

Bottling day came and the beer was duly bottled.

And then I waited a whole two weeks before even trying my ale. For me that’s an eternity but this is what a patient beer brewer must do if he wants to make quality tasting beer.

So, how did the ale taste? Did it reach lofty heights of flavour as suggested by the PR spin?

I made a simple beer. 

It tasted earthy and brown. 

I can’t say that the goldings hops did anything amazing for the beer but they certainly helped leave a nice aftertaste on the tongue. One could certainly appreciate the malty flavour of the beer so the description of the product bears out somewhat.

The verdict: The Nut Brown Ale kit from Black Rock is a handy example of the beer. It’s not flash in the pan but for the home brewer that’s conscious that some beer kits can be ludicrously expensive, this particular kit gives good value for money.

Update: I have brewed several Nut Brown ales since this initial review and I can confirm that as I've become a better brewer, these ales have become even more drinkable. 

Check out the Black Rock range prices on Amazon.

Leave a Comment beer kit review, black rock, goldings, green bullet, nut brown ale, pacific gem

Coopers Lager beer kit review - any good?

If you were forced on threat of being made to drink warm parsnip wine* to name one beer brewing kit brand, I think that Coopers would probably be the first one to come to many brewers minds. 

Even non-brewers will probably have heard of Coopers as the kit that their 'dad made a few brews with it back in the day'.

While I’ve been giving the Williams Warns and Black Rock kits a go of late, a chance find of a Coopers Lager while doing the supermarket shopping has led us to brew one of their lagers.

A bit of google research shows us Coopers is a large Australian owned brewery known for great sparkling ales and their original pale ale. They are also almost synonymous with home brewing and their home microbrewing kits are very popular.

So this extract kit we are brewing comes with a good reputation for quality and I'm are going to assume a great taste!

So is there anything special I need to know about brewing a lager from a kit?

There’s a general rule of home brewing that’s often stated as an absolute so take this with a great 'grain of salt' when I say that it’s easy to make an ale than a larger.

Or perhaps more accurately stated, it is easier to hide anything brewing mistakes with an ale than a larger. This is largely due to the strength of the beer's flavours.

The first thing to consider is that the word lager is derived from a German word, lagern. It means ‘to store’. This should be a strong clue on how to make a good lager – they were originally stored for a long period in cold caves – and thus the lagering process was born as storing beer properly is really important.

So here's your instructions:

Patience is an absolutely needed virtue here. 

Due to lager yeasts operating best at lower temperatures, they actually ferment the beer at a lower rate than compared to ales which often ferment at higher temperatures.

This can mean that to get a lager brewed from a kit to be at its best for drinking, you may need to let it ‘lager’ for more weeks than you normally let an ale sit. So hide it in a dark corner of the garden shed.

And maybe brewing it during winter.

I digress. 

While I will be using the yeast that comes with a Cooper’s kit, when making a lager one could always use a yeast that is a true lager yeast. If you're feeling adventurous, you might want to order the Lager YeastWL833 - it's a popular yeast for lager brewing.

There’s plenty of more things to think about brewing lagers but I need to move on.

So to the actual preparation of the Coopers Lager kit

To get the true taste and worth of this extract kit, I'm not adding any extra flavours and we used dextrose only. No beer enhancer and no additional hops were added.

This might be somewhat of a mistake but for once I felt the need to try the kit on its own merits where the true flavours and characteristics of the beer wort alone come out to play.

This is a standard brew. I'm are not doing anything special and I'm are basically following the instructions on the can. Not that you necessarily must do this.

As usual, I sanitised the heck out of our fermenter drum to make sure that no sneaky microbes were lurking. First up we added one KG of dextrose to one litre of freshly boiled water and made sure it was mixed well – easily enough to do when the water is that hot!

I then added the contents of the kit.

Before I actually poured the malty goodness into the fermenter as well, I boiled the kettle. I then added the kit’s contents. I then added the boiled water into the can nearly all the way to the top. This way the extract would melt and I would be able to get all of it out from the can. 

Be careful though, the can will get very hot so I like to transfer it to the fermenter with a tea towel.

I then added 23 or so litres of water from the garden hose. This cools the wort to the point where the yeast has an environment to do its thing. If I added the yeast to the wort without the cool water, it would probably die.

Speaking of yeast, I should mention that before I did anything during this brew, I added it to a glass of warm water to activate it. The theory is that doing so gives the yeast more of a chance to compete with the wort itself. 

If that makes any sense.

Then I put the lid on the fermenter and placed it in the man cave covered in several sheets.

And then I waited.

I waited for 10 days which is possibly a little longer brewing time than needed and then I bottled.

And then I waited three weeks.

Remember above when I mentioned patience? You need to have GNR's Patience level of patience. 

This felt like an eternity but I had some bohemian pilsners to keep my throat wet so it wasn’t such a hardship….

So what’s the verdict on my Cooper’s lager?

I made a decent homebrew beer! 

This was a no nonsense brew. No hops, no beer enhancer.

To my mind, this meant I got to get to try the true characteristics of the beer.

Featuring a nice clear gold colour, it tasted like a standard beer. 

It had an OK head but fairly little body but no worse than some other beers I have made without enhancer (Coopers do their own enhancer if you're in the market for some). While this was not an amazing brew, I have produced a genuinely good drinking beer, if not one that would benefit from a good body.

This will be best served quite chilled and to that end, would be quite nice to drink at the end of a long hot day. 

By my reckoning, the beer was a shade over 4 percent alcohol by volume.

I figure if you were going to add hops you would not going wrong with a combination of both Moteuka and Saaz hops. (speaking of Saaz, check out my Riwika hops and lager experiment)

Grab a kit from Amazon today.

Update:

I also have now taken a couple of turns with the Coopers Pale Ale kits. I found they are pretty basic kits. To get the best out of them you definitely need to use an enhancer and the kit strongly benefits from the use of hops. I found the Pale Ales take a while to be drinkable and from 4 weeks on after conditioning, they were fine to drink when served cold.

Overall, I would not recommend brewing with a Coopers Pale Ale kit - unless you want 'cheap beer'.  

* Having actually tasted parsnip wine, I can confirm it to be one of the most horrid liquids in existence. 

2 comments beer kit review, coopers, how to brew with a beer kit, lager, micro brewing, pale ale

Lion Brown Lager Malt Extract Kit Review

 

Lion Brown Lager Malt Extract Kit Review

For fellow Kiwi's Lion Nathan is a classic New Zealand Brewing company. It's one of the two major players and famous for its Steinlager brew and Double Brown.  

Or 'Dobros' as the kids call it. 

Anyways, I spied at The Brewhouse that they had a Lion Draft Malt kit - I'm pretty sure I haven't tried this kit before, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. 

Into a sanitized drum she went with some beer enhancer. A fair bit of experience has shown that, yes you can make a beer with a kit like this, you will need an enhancer to increase the body and drinkability of your beer!

I do like to get every drop out! 

Added a very small about of fuggle hops - just some I had hiding in the fridge and then set the drum up under some sheets in the shed. The Draught kit itself already has some Green Bullet and Pacific Gem hops in the malt.

I left this brew alone for well over two weeks. 

On a lazy Sunday morning, I bottled the whole 20 odd litres. It smelled OK in a stock standard sense and tasted like a beer should. 

Review Verdict:

I waited a week and had my first try. 

I had made a standard beer. It was slightly dry and obviously could do with more carbonation. 

A couple of weeks later, I chilled a few in the fridge overnight and opened one after a very nice lasagne. 

It went done well. 

As you may have suspected, the Lion Brown beer was a malty beer that came out nice and golden. It's nothing fancy but it's a half-decent beer for a kit at last than $20 bucks.

It's probably actually an ideal kit for when you want to boil a batch and add some speciality grains - where you want those grains to dictate the flavour outcome rather than the malt kit itself.  

Leave a Comment beer kit review, draught, lion brown

Review of William Warn's 'Bohemian' Pilsner beer kit

I decided to try the Williams Warn Bohemian Pilsner at the suggestion of a keen home brewer.

Williams Warn’s version of a traditional Bohemian Pilsner is touted as having “a rich, complex maltiness and a crisp finish”.

So that’s the challenge for this home brewer, can I produce this beer as described?

What is a bohemian pilsner?

There are basically two kinds of pilsners, the German and Bohemian. The difference between the two is often the  geographicsource of their ingredients.

Bohemian brews are said to have a more malty character that the German version and so I guess that's why WilliamsWarn is mentioning it in their product description.

Let’s talk about the actual kit

The kit includes a 3.75 pound can of pre-hopped Premium Bohemian Pilsner liquid malt extract, designed by Ian Williams and crafted at Lion Brewery in New Zealand. 

Lion Nathan is of course famous for producing it’s own world conquering beer, Steinlager.

I combined the beer kit with WilliamsWarn’s own DME pack which I think from memory was 1250 grams or about 3 pounds.

The yeast was the Fermentis Saflager W34/70 lager yeast which is a popular brewing yeast for lagers that originated from where else but Germany.  

Brewing the Warns William kit

The brewing was a pretty standard affair following the usual beer brewing practices, the only thing of note was I added some cascade hops. I should more properly use a noble hops such as sazz but the cascade was all I had!

I suspect this combination may give me a potentially fruity taste which could contradict the intended crisp taste that’s sought but we’ll see.

Let’s talk about the yeast

The first thing I noticed about the yeast packet was that it had approximately twice the amount of yeast of any other beer kit that I’ve ever used.

So I was not surprised when less than two hours after pitching the yeast I walked back into the man shed and heard the barrel happily bubbling away quite strongly.

I looked into the yeast a bit further and learned that the Williams Warn claims 'When you pitch these yeasts into your wort, you’ll see activity within hours.'

So their claims were true and that totally gives me confidence that this beer kit comes from a brewer who actually knows what they are talking about.

Good stuff.

The brew carried on bubbling very strongly  for three full days at a pretty good rate and then it slowly wound down.

Into the bottle goes the brown liquid

Bottling day came 6 days later.

The beer smelt and tasted good. 

I bottled into a variety of 750 and 500 mls bottles.  

I also tried to use as little sugar as possible as I’m quite conscious that I’ve had a few too many gushers of late.

That’s just a waste of beer and money eh?

So what's the verdict on the beer?

I conditioned for two weeks and hand a wee taste test. The pilsner proved to be quite a tasty drop. It had a nicely balanced body and left a great after taste.

Despite the addition of cascade hops, their effect was quite minimal. I perhaps should added more?

Being a pilsner it was drunk nice and cold, which is just what you need for some summer drinking. 

It also gave good head, which is always pleasing... 

How did the beer compare to Williams Warn's description? Did it have “a rich, complex maltiness and a crisp finish” as touted by the brand?

Kind of!

The beer certainly did have a malt taste that I would not expect of a pilsner but that could be the effect of too many years drinking mass produced pilsners.

As for a crisp finish, I would not describe my brew as having one, none-the-less it was a very drinkable beer. 

And what of the beer's look?

Indeed, I made a fine, deep golden beer.

I would happily brew this beer again! It's probably quite a good kit to boil and then do a hops boil with.

If you want more than my word for this beer kit, check out the reviews for it on Amazon.

Leave a Comment beer kit, beer kit review, bohemian pilsner, cascade, hops, how to brew with a beer kit, williamswarn

Brewing with two malt kits

Brewing beer with two malt extract kits 

As a beer kit brewer - I've often seen brewing forums chatter about brewing with two cans of malt rather than the traditional one can with added sugars such as dextrose.

I thought it was time to do an experiment and see for myself if using solely two kits for a beer would translate into a good tasting beer.

Given two kits can effectively double the cost of your brew, I grabbed two cans of the cheapest kits I could find at the supermarket which just happened to be Cooper's Stout. Having made reasonable brews with Coopers DIY Kits in the past, I was confident I'd be able to make a drinkable beer!

So how did this experiment go down?

One makes the double kit beer wort in the traditional one kit way except the recipe is effectively doubled.

This means I am adding double the usual amount of malt. This means there's going to be a lot of fermentable molecules in the wort, at a higher ratio than normal (standard 1 KG plus roughly 700 grams more).

Given there is hops oil in each can, I am also doubling the hops count of the batch - this will likely mean that the bitterness of the beer will double (well, let's see how that pans out).

What is also happening is that we are not adding any extra sucrose or dextrose (I usually use a beer enhancer to assist with better taste and good mouth feel). I think that is going to have quite an effect on the beer as I noted above that there will be a vastly higher ratio of malt to water than my usual beer kit brews.

Given this, I suspect the Final Gravity will be higher than the norm and I imagine the ABV may be in the range of 5 - 6 percent though that may be pushing it. Even if it's not that high, I'll get a nice sweet brew.

I am also adding double the yeast as having two kits means I've got two sachets. I think I could have got away with just using one packet but figured let's roll the dice and see what happens. It's possible the extra 700 grams of malt could give the yeast some trouble so some extra will probably help.

I added both packets to a glass of warm water so that it was 'activated' before it when into the wort. I'm not hugely convinced this actually makes a massive difference but I've read that it helps where there's a lot of sugars (malt) in the wort.

The Dark Knight watches over the yeast

I prepared the brew after cleaning and sanitizing the fermenter drum and left it overnight in the kitchen where it was warm.

Here's my trick for getting all the malt out of a can without making too much mess:



So how did this experiment work out?

On return from work that evening (so roughly 36 hours) I observed that fermentation had been going really well. This is probably due to having used two yeast sachets as I have never seen this much bubble activity before:



Those dark brown spots you can see are actually yeast clumps that got caught in the foam after fermentation went into hyperdrive (attack of the Krausen!). I grabbed a clean spoon and gently stirred them back into the wort. I then closed the lid back up nice and tight and carried the drum up to the shed where I wrapped it up in a pile of old towels.

It's just settling into spring here so it will not be too cold in the shed. I'll leave it there for a week at least to let the fermentation fully complete. If I'm really patient, I'll leave the brew to settle a bit longer than that.

Let's see how we go.


-

And we're back!

It's been just under two weeks since we pitched the yeast into the wort.

I have bottled the beer. A test taste at the time revealed it has quite a strong flavor and it smelt really 'heavy'. It also had a very 'Coopers' taste to it. It appeared to be a nice dark brown color.

Let's wait another couple of weeks before we do a taste test once the bottles have carbonated and conditioned.

-

Time for a drink?

Spring has kicked in quite nicely so there should have been a fairly even brewing / conditioning temperature (other than night and day changes).

The verdict:

This is a 'fair beer' and with another two weeks of conditioning, it will be a very enjoyable beer.

It's malty as fuck. That should really be no surprise eh?

Having drunk the whole glass fairly quickly, I get the impression the beer has an ABV higher than the brews I usually make (around 4 per cent ABV) so I would suspect it's over 5 but not close to 6. Yes, yes, I should have done some gravity readings...

This double malt kit brew would have benefitted definitely from some additional hops such as Goldings or Fuggles. This mostly is because Coopers is simply a 'stock standard' beer kit.

Given this is the first Cooper's stout I've brewed, I'm fairly happy with how the beer has turned out.

The beer had little head as I suspect I slightly under sugared the batch for the secondary carbonation.

In terms of economy, the two kits cost about 35 bucks (NZ price) whereas a usually single can and enhancer combo would cost around 27 - so the question is whether the extra 8 bucks makes enough of a difference to the brew?  If one is trying for a higher than usual ABV stout, then yes, especially one that is dripping with malty tones!

Leave a Comment abv, beer kit, beer kit review, malt, stout

Review of Mangrove Jack's New Zealand Brewers Series Beer Kit

Review of Mangrove Jack's New Zealand Brewers Series beer pouch kit

I was in checking out Brewshop the other week and I saw that Mangrove Jack's (an Aussie based company) had a new kit on the market called the "New Zealand Brewer's Series".

This piqued my curiosity as what is uniquely New Zealand about beer kits? 

Other than Black Rock and Williams Warn both being made in the Speights factory, Nothing is the answer - so this means the kit is probably just a rebrand of their existing products for the NZ market.

I spied their Golden Ale, which purports to be "A clear golden ale with subtle malt and fruit undertones, finished with a pleasing bitterness."

At 20 NZ bucks, it was a competitive price so I thought I'd give it a brew and review.

So, what do we do first? I cleaned and sanitized the fermenter drum with boiling water and sodium percarbonate.

I then added the brew enhancer from Brewshop and added a kettle of boiling water.

I then opened the Mangrove Jack's box pack and to my surprise, it was actually a pouch inside the box.

This actually should have been no surprise as Mangrove Jack's are well known for their kits being in pouch form rather than tin can!

I cut open the pouch with my key chain multi-tool and added the contents to the drum. Perhaps the kit's contents were a bit cold as I really had to squeeze it out.

Indeed, I felt there was quite a lot left in the pouch so I added some boiling water to it to help melt the remainder and made sure I got most of it out it and into the wort.

This process was a bit more difficult than doing it with a tin can kit. I venture a complete novice at brewing would have made a huge mess!

I then gave it all a good stir and then added water so that there were about 23 liters in the drum. I then added the yeast that I had set aside in a glass of warm water to help hydrate it.

I noticed when adding the yeast that it all came out pretty easily and there were not many bits of it stuck to the inside of the packet (which happens a lot with Blackrock kits for example).

I then chucked the drum into the shed.

It's currently the start of winter so it will be a bit cold out there so we'll see how the fermentation goes!

Let's check back in about ten days after primary fermentation.

...and we're back.

It's actually been two whole weeks and tonight I have just bottled the beer. Instead of batch priming, I sugared each bottle individually. This is because I have somehow managed to over prime my last two stouts and those were some wee fizzy buggers which kind of ruined the beer drinking experience.

So, let's check back in another two weeks for a taste test.

...and we're back.

Honestly, this is an 'average' result. Not average in the sense people say that word to not mean good but average in the mathematical sense. It's not an inspiring brew by any means however it feels like a stock standard beer.

Another two weeks conditioning will improve this beer but I've made enough of these brews to know where the beer is headed.

It's flavour would definitely have been improved by the addition of some English or Citrus type hops.

So, what we've got here is a good result in the sense this Mangrove's Jack offering is a stock standard homebrew kit and for the price, you can't complain if that's the kind of beer you want to make!

If you want to try a different kind of brewing experiment, consider brewing with two malt kits at the same time!

1 comment beer kit review, brew and review, golden ale, how to brew with a beer kit, mangrove jack's, New Zealand Brewer's Series

Review of Te Aro's Obligatory fresh wort pack

My beer making success with Te Aro Brewing Co's 'Obligatory' fresh wort pack

I was lucky enough to catch up with Nathan from Te Aro Brewing Company (we used to be workmates at a fairly well known internet company some years back) and to meet the brewery's founder Karl Kayes.

The brewery has a front-of-shop known as Brewtopia, wherein they shared with me a taste of some of their wares.

Nathan offered me a sample of their Oligatory pale ale beer. A fine tasting beer, I offered my compliments. He then blew my mind by offering me one of Te Aro Brewing Company's 'Obligatory' fresh wort packs to try out and review.

Such is my sophistication when it comes to beer making, I'd never heard of a fresh wort pack before but soon enough I was lugging around 20 litres of ready made Obligatory wort back home.

On arrival my wife looked at me with some suspicion.

What had  I brought home in this mysterious black container.

Petrol? Insecticide?

No darling, beer!

So, I grabbed the fermenter and gave it a clean and then sanitized with some sodium percarbonate.

I was extra particular about this process and I rinsed it all out with boiling water. There was no way I was going to let this special treat from Te Aro get ruined by poor preparation! This took me about 10 minutes.

Before I started this cleaning process I actually got the yeast going by adding it to a glass of warm water. The yeast was the popular home brewer's choice of Safale US-05.

So, now it came time to prepare the beer.

I emptied the 20 litres of wort into the fermenter, making sure it splashed around quite a lot to ensure the wort got some oxygen into it (this helps with fermentation).

It was a nice light brown colour and not as thick as I imagined it would be (probably as I'm so used to making brews with beer kits).

And then less than a minute later, I was ready to pitch the yeast.

It was almost too easy.

I put the lid on the fermenter and added the airlock.

I did not add any hops at this stage. Not my normal approach, but I intended to follow Nathan's instructions as best I could so I added the hops at day 5.

So straight away I was able to see the benefit of using a pre-made wort - you save a lot of time, there's no need to go and buy a beer enhancer or DME and it's a lot less messy than dealing with a beer kit.

Indeed, there's no mess with a wort pack!

You can actually recycle the wort pack container by taking it back to Brewtopia on a brewing day for a new wort and a wee discount as you are using your own storage device!

Nathan recommended that the brew is stored in a dark place with an average temperature of between 14 to 22 degrees centigrade and that 16 - 20 is best. I'll be frank, I have no idea what the temperature was but I left it in my warm kitchen for 48 hours.

I then transferred it to my man shed outside and covered it with a whole pile of old sheets and towels.

Classic move eh?

At this point I noted that no bubbles were coming out of the airlock, nor did I observe any scum or residue lining the inside of the fermenter, early days though and the lack of bubbles after two days does not mean I have a brewing disaster on my hands!

At day 5 I added the hops - a combination of some delicious smelling Nelson Sauvin, NZ Cascade and Motueka. On opening the fermenter's lid I was now able to see a great layer of bubbles and scum so clearly something good had been occurring.

So now it was a waiting game to let the brew do its thing.

Bottling day

I prepared the Obligatory on the 27th of September and bottled two weekends later on the 9th of October. This was a couple of days shy of the time recommended by Nathan but whatever, close enough!

Bottling was a straightforward exercise and I was very diligent with sanitizing the bottles.

Now it's an even longer wait!

So while I wait, let's talk about the ingredients of the beer and whether fresh wort packs are worth it.

Wort pack ingredients

Malt: Gladfields American Ale Malt, Gladfields Pale Crystal, Gladfields Toffee Malt,
Hops: Nelson Sauvin, NZ Cascade and Motueka

I gotta tell ya, that combination of hops was one of the most delicious smells. I kept them in the fridge until it was time to add them and everytime I opened the fridge, I got the most delightful whiff of them.

Pricing and whether a fresh wort pack is wort(h) it

So what's the cost? Let's be clear, this is not a cheap product. It's a quality product so expect a quality price of $70 for the wort.

This also includes the Safale yeast and the hops which should make your wallet feel a bit better.

There is no need for an enhancer because Te Aro Brewery has made the wort such as they would make their Obligatory to sell to their keen punters and the local Wellington bars which want quality craft beers to serve their fickle* patrons.

If you compare that to a using a beer kit, fresh yeast, extra hops and an enhancer, you're looking at approximately $40 a brew (that is if you use a lower range beer kit). So that $30 odd dollar difference is buying you a beer quality well above what may be achieved with a standard beer kit.

It's also buying you time.

It took only a few minutes to get the fermenter clean and the yeast pitched into the wort. And that was the longest part of the whole brewing exercise.

So if you are time sensitive, a fresh wort pack is the way to go.

Let's be clear, I'm not knocking beer kits, I think they are great!

The verdict. How did the Obligatory taste?

I'm not a patient man, I could hardly wait a week, let alone three to try the Obligatory.

So, I tried one a week after bottling.

I gotta tell you, I had some high expectations around this brew and I was not disappointed.

This was a most excellent tasting beer, even only after a week of conditioning. It possessed a bold, hoppy taste.

It felt oakey in some way, which sounds pretentious but it's not.

It has an excellent mouthfeel with some good body.

It's a very easy drinking beer and I look forward to enjoying it further with the first BBQ of the summer season.

I firmly recommend this to any beer maker who is looking for a quick way to make genuine quality home brew beer.

Update - after a two week conditioning period I had another crack and the flavours were even more amazing. This is probably the best tasting beer I have ever brewed. 

I'm sold Jimmy, where can I buy the wort kit?

Brewtopia sell their wort online, so grab yourself one today - you can always visit and have a yarn with the brewing team.

You can also sign up to Te Aro's Wort Pack email list so you'll be in the know when batches are ready.

*fickle, yes I said that. Beer drinkers can be the worst snobs. 

Leave a Comment ale beer kits, beer kit review, brew and review, fresh wort pack, home brew, pale ale, wort

Review of 'Dry Stout' Kit by Williams Warn

So are these dry stout kits worthing using?

Having had a fairly good experience with the WilliamsWarn's 'Bohemian Pilsner' homebrew kit, I thought I'd give their 'Dry Stout' a go.

If you think of Irish stout's like Guinness or Murphy's, that's the ballpark we are in.

The product maker makes this claim:

"Our Dry Stout has a black appearance from the crystal malts, roasted malts and roasted barley employed in the grain mix. The result is a great Dry Stout that has liquorice, roasted coffee and chocolate flavours dominating."

Getting ready on the kitchen bench!

Will I be able to make a beer that matches this claim?

Let's find out!

I did the basic preparation as you do for kits.

Basically, I followed my own beer making guide!

I left my wort to sit in a fermenter in my garden shed. As winter was starting to settle in, I took measures to ensure the temperature remained consistent by wrapping the fermenter with a few old painting sheets.

By controlling the temperature during fermentation, you can produce a better tasting beer. The cooler temperatures of winter can be an ideal time to brew, as long as you take precautions to maintain a consistent temperature. In my case, I was able to create an optimal environment for my beer to ferment by using a simple technique of wrapping the fermenter with old painting sheets.

The fermenter started bubbling within 24 hours and stopped doing so around day 4 or 5.

I bottled 8 days after getting the beer down. I didn't taste it but it had a nice smell, perhaps one more noticeable than many other brews I've previously done. 

And now we wait.

So while we wait for the stout to bottle condition, let's shoot the breeze about a few other things.

What was the yeast used for the stout?

The yeast that came with the beer kit was a 11g pack of Fermentis S-04 yeast.

This yeast is often used with English ales. It's an adaptable yeast that actually suits a range of ales (you could use it with a nut brown ale for example) and is known for its ability to form a compacted sediment at the bottom of the fermenter. This is awesome as when bottling there's less chance of sediment getting into your finished beer, giving you the oft prized clear beer.

Fermentis recommend that their yeast should be added to the wort when it is above 20 degrees centigrade. Frankly, after I filled the fermenter with water from the garden hose, I just pitched in it!

I've read that the kit also sometimes comes with the Danstar Nottingham ale yeast.

With the kit and same branded Light Dry Malt Extract, I paid 44 dollars which is a bit on the steep side, if you ask me. The DME cost 20 bucks! Nearly as much as the kit as itself.

So I guess the idea is that Williams Warn is supposed to be a 'premium beer kit' producer. Actually, the prices on Amazon are about the same as what I paid so go figure.

But to be frank, when I made the Bohemian Pilsner I didn't notice any real difference in quality say compared to a Mangrove Jacks or Coopers kit. I'm actually pretty sure that most kits on the market these days are quite suitable kits for brewing with.

But enough of this 'chit chat'.

The tasting results are in.

First up, I brought a few bottles in from the shed after a couple of weeks conditioning and left them in the fridge for two nights.

I then opened and slowly poured into a long glass. The beer smelled really good and was a nice dark colour, just the kind one would expect. A small but creamy looking head formed which bode well for the taste test.

And I gotta say, this was a pretty good darn beer. It had some thick body and it felt like it was heavy enough to count as a stout. The Williams Warn kit had delivered.

But did it deliver on the promise of making beer in which "liquorice, roasted coffee and chocolate flavours" dominate?

It's a romantic description but in a sense it's true.

While I certainly haven't detected any liquorice notes, the coffee and chocolate notes where present but they are not pronounced.

I can't help but wonder if this brew would have been better if I had used oak chips to give it some flavour boost.

Review Verdict: Recommend you have a crack. Order the kit from Amazon today.

You can also check out the time I made a double beer kit stout!

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