Easy beginner's guide to home brewing from a beer kit

Beginner's guide to brewing beer from a kit

Well done you on deciding to brew some home brew.

This guide will help guide through making your first batch of beer using a kit, step by step. It's a 'how to' for using beer kits and not beer from 'scratch'.

There is no boiling of the wort wizardry here, just some brewing 101 tips as if they came from a brewing book!

That fancy 'brewing day' in a pot stuff will come later, probably when you've got a couple of brews under your belt and you're ready to go upgrade your methodology.

If you are genuinely interested in learning how to brew beer, then a beer kit is a great way to start as you can quickly learn the fundamentals of beer making in the comfort of your own kitchen or man shed.

The brewing of beer is actually an act of scientific exploration.

Now get to it!

Getting ready, at which point I assume you are ready to make beer

I'm going to assume you have a brand new beer kit for making beer.

Your loving partner may have given it to you for Christmas (mine did!) or maybe you got there yourself out of curiosity. Either way good on you for giving beer making a go.

You have all the ingredients and supplies:

• A can of malt extract
• Some brewing sugar, dextrose or a brew enhancer (we really recommend the use of an enhancer).
• Yeast - it may have come with the kit, look under the lid...
• You might even have bought some beer hops to add to your wort.

You will have all the equipment.

You'll have a fermenter  - possibly a 30 litre drum or 5 gallon glass carboy.

You have access to boiling water and also to cold water.

You'll have a clean working space such as a kitchen bench and you'll have enough time to not be interrupted.

When I brew from home brew kits I do it after dinner when the kids are in bed and the dishes are done. It's just easier that way.

I might even have a couple of beers while I do the job, because it seems a natural enough thing to do right?

It's time to clean and sanitize your equipment

In case you hadn't heard, your beer wort needs a warm and clean environment in which to ferment.

That means all that nasty bacteria that are on your stirring spoon and on the inside of your fermenter drum or bottle need to be thoroughly cleaned and then sanitized.

Your homebrew starter kit should have provided you with a sachet of a cleanser and also a sanitiser (people often refer to this process as sterilization, just go with it).

Leave your drum to soak for as long as possible (even though it's new, it's likely had all the equipment stored inside it if it's a drum, so heaps of opportunity for nasties to find a home in there).

If you plan on continuing to brew beers, this is the start of your habit of cleaning and sanitizing all your equipment every single time you make beer.

Every.

Single.

Time.

So once you are sure everything has had a good soak, carry on my wayward son to making a top-rated beer.

The rest is easy...

There are plenty of beer making methods.

We can do it in four steps.

Step 1 - Malt Up

If you're smart, you may have already put your opened tin of extract malt into a pot of boiling water so that it's warmed up and can be easily poured into your fermenter.

Sometimes I leave it sitting on the top of my closed fireplace, this works well too.

At this point, I like to put on some fancy surgical gloves so as to avoid the mess that's probably about to happen all over your kitchen bench.

Add your extract malt and about 3 liters of boiling water to your fermenter.

Stir with a sterilized stirring device until it's all dissolved.

Don't accidentally leave the spoon in your kit...

Your brew kit probably came with a beer enhancer, now is the time to add it and dissolve as well.

If your kit did not have an enhancer, you really should think about adding some and you will get a better mouth feel and enjoy your beer that much better.

Otherwise, you're probably going to add 1kg of dextrose or ordinary sugar (we do not recommend that as it will affect how your beer tastes).

Step 2 - Water is the essence of aqua...

It's time to add the water.

I like to use the garden hose so I carry the fermenter to the kitchen back door and go for gold.

The water in NZ where I'm from is pretty good. If the water is of poor quality where you come from, you may wish to find a better source of water, at the least boil it maybe.

I guess the basic rule is if you can handle drinking a glass of water from it, that's your source. Expert brewers like to test the pH level to ensure it will suit the beer. There are some amazing pH tester options on the market for testing home brew beer.

Fill your fermenter to 5 gallons of water or to the 23 liter mark. Stick with that, your malt kit has been designed with exactly this amount of water in mind. If you add to much water, your wort will be diluted and your beer's 'mouthfeel' will be unappealing. If you add to little, you will actually raise the 'alcohol by volume' content of your beer.

Which is fine if you like things like that but remember, in doing so you are changing the profile of your beer.

Yeast

Step 3 - Yeastie Boys

It's time to add the yeast. This is called 'pitching'.

Seasoned pros will tell you to never use the yeast that comes in your starter kit or with your can of malt as it may be old or damaged or whatever.

I'm thinking you just want to make some bloody beer so throw what came with your kit into to your fermenter and worry about that kind of issue when it actually occurs.

But wait!

Make sure the temperature of the water is close to in line with the instructions on the tin of malt - you want to give the yeast a chance to activate so don't put it in or 'pitch' it if you're out of whack. That said in my experience just pitch it in when you're ready.

There are plenty of good brewing thermometers out there but your fermenter may have a heat sensitive sticker on the side that tells the temperature.

But be warned, only pitch your yeast when you've added the extra water and chilled the wort - if you pitch your yeast into the boiled wort, you will kill the yeast which means you'll have no fermentation happening and you'll have a malty drink on your hands.

You're not making Panhead Supercharger here, you're making your first batch of home brew.

Protip - aerate your wort with a pump prior to pitching yeast to give the yeast a performance boost (but when bottling, try to avoid aeration as much as possible).

Step 4 - Hop to it

If your kit came with some hops or you were smart enough to procure some, chuck them in now, maybe half the packet. This is called dry hopping.

Some might recommend adding the hops 5 days into the fermentation process but we say just get on with it.

Close up the fermenter, make sure the drum or cap is on firmly.

Add your airlock with water inside. You'll use this to keep track of fermentation by observing the CO2 bubbles as they are released during fermentation.

A failure to see bubbles does not mean fermentation has failed!

Take a hydrometer reading

Once you've got the basics down, you might want to think about boiling the malt extract. 

Step 5 - Let fermenting beer lie

This has now become a waiting game.

Once you've put your beer in a suitable place where the temperature will be fairly consistently warm, leave her alone.

Set and forget...

Well not quite - if you have a hydrometer, take a reading and write it down. You will need it to be able to work out when fermentation is complete and also the alcohol content of your beer.

A loose guide is when the bubbles are finished, fermentation is usually complete. Once you are sure this is the case, you can think about bottling your beer.

This is an occasion where you should consider completely ignoring the instructions on the can and leave your brew in the fermenter for about 2 weeks.

While at face value fermentation is complete, the yeast will still be interacting with everything and this extra time will greatly improve the quality of your beer.

Be patient!

Let me know when you are ready to bottle!

So the short summary on how to make your home made beer:

1. Add your malt from the can to 3 litres of hot water
2. Add any brew enhancer or dextrose, as well as any hops. Stir it all up.
3. Fill fermenter to 23 litres or 6 gallons with cold.
4. Check the temperature is OK and then pitch in your yeast.
5. Add the bubble airlock, firmly seal the drum and place in a cool position.
6. Ensure fermentation is complete. You may want to use a hydrometer during this stage.
7. Bottle when ready but it's best to let your brew sit for 2 to 3 weeks.

So that's the rough guide to brewing beer from a kit.

As you can read, it's a pretty straight forward exercise and you don't need a Bachelor of Food Technology to get it right.

It's about good old home economics and it's a little bit about applying some common sense.

You might want to bear these easy to make mistakes in mind.

The absolute key things to bear in mind are having properly sanitized equipment, following this guide and its hopefully helpful beer making instructions more or less and don't stress.

Beer can be a tough mistress, but it can be pretty forgiving...

When you've become an expert on making a good beer mash, you might want to start thinking about the pH levels of your beer and testing your water quality or even try brewing with two kits at once.boiling the malt extract

5 comments brewing beer guide, dextrose, how to brew that first beer, how to brew with a beer kit, sugar

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

When to boil a malt extract beer kit can

Boiling malt extract kits for better beer - should I?

The short answer is that as far as I can really tell, the main reason to boil a wort extract is so that you can keep boiling the wort so you, extra speciality grains and that you can add your hops and thus boil the hops to the timings of your recipe and thus extract the kind of hops bitterness you are going for.

Read on for the long version and in and outs of doing so.... 

Using a beer kit is kind of like doing an all-grain brew without the mashing and steeping of the grains - that's all be done for you with the kit.

For if brewing is not one massive scientific experiment that's quite fun, what is it?

I've made probably just shy of a hundred malt extra kit brews without boiling the wort. The way I see it is that I'm following a pretty simple cake recipe - I just pack everything together, pitch some hops (dry hopping) and let the fermentation begin. 

I'm a simple man, I make simple beer.

Sometimes I go crazy and add some golden syrup...  

Sure, this is a pretty basic position to achieve the most simplest of brews, however, like a pick-a-path book, there are many options which may yet convince you to boil the extract malt and then have a bit it of a play.

If you want a more nuanced beer, one that hits the right flavour notes, then boiling your malt extract and turning it into a hot wort, might be the way to go for you. 

Here's the why:

Adding hops into the wort (unfermented beer) produce a bitterness that is used to balance out the malt's sweetness and of course also to provide the hoppy fruity flavours and smells & aromas that make beers like unique, brilliant and most of all, a genuine drinking experience

At the most basic level, if you don’t boil hops into a kit beer, you’re just making the beer style indicated on the kit. And that beer could be totally drinkable, and chances are it will be. There's nothing wrong with taking a Coopers lager kit, adding some DME, yeast and you're away.

It's the same as if you don’t boil hops into an all-grain beer, you’re not going to like the result.

But what if like Fleetwood Mac, you want to go your own way?

Some choices in a pick-a-path are better than others right?

This is a grand generalisation but here's an excellent guide, especially for noob beginners:

How to boil a malt kit to make great beer

We're going to assume you are down with the basics of brewing beer. 

You appreciate that your gear and fermentation device need to be cleaned and sanitized. You've got a big enough kettle drum to do the boil in and you've got a gas burner that has the balls to do the job, because when it comes to boiling wort, heat is neat.

In its most basic form, extract brewing involves dissolving your chosen malt extract in about eight litres of hot water to give you wort. In some cases, you'll need to add sugar or dextrose too (or a beer enhancer), depending on the recipe. 

Bring to the boil, add your favourite hops and continue to boil the wort for as long as your recipe specifies to develop the bitterness. You'll need a vigorous boil but try not to let too much liquid boil off -as three things that you do not want to happen can - your wort wort may darken, the sugars could caramalise, and the hops won't deliver the bitterness you want imparted into you beer. 

Once that's all done, you need to cool the wort as fast as you can.

There's all kinds of ways to do that - from putting the kettle into an ice bath through to using a wort chiller. You then transfer to the fermentation drum, top up to about 23L with cold & clean water, pitch the yeast and then continue with normal practices such as storage at a proper fermentation temperature.

Now that above is the most basic guidance, the timing of adding hops to impart bitterness is a bit like that Roy Orbison song, She's a Mystery To Me... 

For the more curious, here's some handy tips to think about: 

Be wary of over boiling the malt

You must remember to stir the wort as you add the malt extract to avoid scorching it on the bottom of the pot. 

Extract is denser than water, so it will naturally sink to the bottom of the kettle and be exposed to that 60 - 70 centigrade heat you've got going. 

A hot kettle will not take long to caramelize and then burn to a sticky, ashy mess. Keep a close eye in it and stir often, at least until the malt has become one with the water. 

You do not need to add the malt extract in all at once. You could do a half and first, wait 10 minutes and then add, or if you wish to be quite cautious you could add a third, add a third and finish with the last third over a 10 - 14 minute period. 

Here's a handy trick, use a wire coat hanger across the kettle and use as a line to hand the malt kits on:

Image credit: Matt Boucher

From wort to boiling hops for bitterness

Most recipes call for a 60 minute boil with several hop additions along the way.

Some brewers advocate a shorter boil to save time and propane, especially if the recipe only calls for late addition hops or whirlpool hopping. That can work out fine, but it’s best to boil for a minimum of 20 minutes to sanitize the wort and get a decent hot break to clear proteins (especially if doing an all grain brew rather than a kit). 

Here's a quick guide on how to boil a malt kit and hop timings.

In general:

• hops added at the start of the boil will contribute a lot of bitterness but little flavour
• hops added with 20 – 30 minutes remaining will add a bit of bitterness and a bit of flavour
• hops added in the last 0 – 10 minutes of the boil will add quite a bit of flavour but little bitterness

Here's the step by step:

• Prepare and sanitise all equipment as you would with a kit beer.
• Bring 6-7 litres of water to the boil in a kettle or pot.
• Add the malt extract, stirring in immediately and taking care not to allow any to sit on the bottom of the pot and burn as discussed above.
• Get all of this to a gently rolling boil and add 10 grams of your chosen hops. Start a countdown timer for 20 minutes.
• With 10 minutes remaining, add 15 grams of extra hops
• With 5 minutes remaining, add 15 grams of extra hops
• With 1 minute remaining, add the final 10 grams of hops (stick with it, you're on the road to make the best-bittered beer you ever have!)
• When the time is up, remove the pot from the heat and cool it as fast as possible. On this small scale, it may be possible to do this by placing in a sink or bath of running cold water or using a wort chiller is probably ideal. 
• When cooled to 25 – 30°C, pour the beer-to-be into your sanitised fermenter or drum.
• Stir and splash the cooled wort to expose it to as much air as possible. You're trying to add Oxygen - at this point of the process, it's really helpful. 
• You can now top-up the fermenter with cold water to around the 23 litre mark, if that's what's recommended on the kit instructions. 
• Pitch yeast and proceed as you would with a kit beer and then expertly store in a place that's warm.
• Follow out beer brewing guide if you need any further intel.

Adding grains to the extracted wort

If you a feeling really adventurous, it's time to consider adding some grains to your brewing process. 'Specialty grains' as they are known in the parlance will add different flavors and colourings to your beer. It's really easy to incorporate them into your boil - the simple trick is to steep them in your hot water before you do the steps described just above:

Put your grains in a steeping bag and let it sit in your pot of water at about 70 degrees for half an hour. Then pull out the bag, crack open your malt extract and get brewing.

If you're just getting in to rock and roll, you may wish to be circumspect with your first choice of grains. Some grains, especially the paler malts, generally need to be properly to be mashed to get any decent flavour from them. 

Handy grains to try steeping are black malt, caraamber malt, chocolate malt, and roasted barley.

If you do this, you are well on your way to brewing a beer that's worthy of being entered in your local beer brewing competition!

What is the difference between extract brewing and all grain brewing?

The key difference between all-grain and extract brewing is that an all-malt wort made from grains is almost always more fermentable than an all-malt wort made from extract. 

It's just the way it is due to how extract kits are made. 

The early beer kits of thirty years ago solved this problem by combining the malt extract with sugar — which is completely fermentable — to yield reasonably dry beers, and this is why homebrew was often looked down in the 70s and 80s (and beyond) because brews could be so very dry. Back in those days not every town had a brew shop you could run down to for some enhancer or dry malt extract. 

The increased availability of the sugar known as dextrose over the last 20 years has changed the kit game considerably.  

One way to look at it is that an extract kit has had the maker decided the beer style for you already, whereas, with grains, the world is your oyster. You can experiment or have a go with recipes that brewers have found tried and true. 

Those such recipes are often shared between good keen blokes and lasses on forums. Some 'google fu' may help you out! 

If you're interested in a Steinlager clone....

Leave a Comment all grain, beer kit, how to brew with a beer kit

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

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