Home Brew Blog

Is it possible to make great beer from a kit?

The first time you make your own beer at home, you may be a bit disheartened if the beer you have made doesn’t compare to one of the many you can buy on the high street.  From my own personal experience (which is very, very limited), when using a beginner’s kit, you are probably not going to be able to reproduce the same results as a professional brewery, but you can definitely create a very drinkable brew from some of the ingredients available online and in stores.

Let’s get one thing straight.  My motivation for brewing beer is not in order to create a world-beating ale (although, if this occurs as a side-effect then all the better for it!), it is simply down to my passion for beer, moreover Real Ale that has led me to the next logical step on my beer journey, the first of which was of course the leap of faith from lagers such as F*sters and C*rling to those funny looking pumps that the older folks were seeming to drink from.

Anyway, I digress.  The relevant question is here is the definition of “good” here.  Of course, the professional beer-making equipment that breweries possess are a million miles away from anything I could dream of having in my home brew infancy, but that is not to say that the beer-making kits that you can buy are not going to give you a “tasty” brew.  To the contrary, for my first brew, I used the plain and simple Youngs Bitter kit about 4-5 months ago, I got 40 pints out of it and it just got better and better every couple of weeks.

I found that after I had followed the instructions of the kit, and waiting the amount of time that was written, that my brew did not live up to what I was expecting… let’s put it this way: I probably wouldn’t have paid £1 for a bottle of it in a pub.  It had a funny aftertaste and there was no head at all for the first month of my brew.  However in late December 2010, as did with Eric when he ate a banana, an amazing transformation occured:  the beer starting frothing up like a PROPER BEER and it even tasted smooth.  I am wondering whether Santa had paid me an early visit but I am still investigating as to how this happened.  I am maintaining that I am just a brilliant brewer.

So please, don’t get disheartened.  Stick with it and no matter what happens, allow yourself a wry smile at the fact that, no matter how much of a disaster you think you’ve made, it will still taste a hell of a lot better than C*rling.

First of all, if you have bought one of the many available beer kits out there, and they didn’t supply any special “brewing sugar” with it, don’t worry… you can use normal household sugar that you can get from your local shop around the corner.

However, if you really do want to get the best out of your homebrew, you should definitely consider purchasing some brewing sugar. The main reason for this is the fact that household sugar is a more complex sugar than brewing sugar. Brewing sugar is 100% dextrose and it is easily broken down into alcohol by the yeast. Household sugar is what is known as sucrose. This needs to be broken down initially into fructose and dextrose by the yeast. However this first process requires an enzyme that does leave a bitter aftertaste. Which is more, fructose can leave a somewhat apple-like aftertaste, something that might want to be avoided.

Where can I buy brewing sugar from?

You can get home brewing sugar from good life home brew for £2.40 per kilo. Click on the image below to find out more.

Don’t forget that it is not the end of the world if you don’t use brewing sugar… but if you’re really enthusiastic about beer, then there really is no substitute.

Where to get your home brew supplies

Probably the cheapest place to buy your home brew supplies nowadays is online. There are a whole host of online retailers where you can buy all of the necessary supplies that you will need to create your first and subsequent brews. For the beginner brewer out there, the most cost effective way of creating your first brew is to buy one of the many starter kits that are available. You can get a basic kit for as little as £25 which will include most of the equipment you will need as well as instructions on how to make sure you can get the best from your brew.

As well as the myriad of online sites where you can find these supplies, it is always worthwhile checking out if there is a local home brew supplier in your area as they will probably be able to give you some good advice face-to-face on what you will need with respect to the level of home brewing you are hoping to achieve. The vast majority of home brewers will be brewing from kits, but there are the committed few who have the time, the patience, the knowhow and the money to indulge in their passion. Many of the large UK supermarkets such as Tesco stock home brewing kits, ingredients and bottling aids.

What supplies should I be looking to get to make a decent batch?

There are so many ways that you can make your first batch and it would be impossible to cover every single way, so we’ll just take a look at what I bought to produce my first batch (which incidentally turned out very well indeed):

Home brew kit

I picked up my first home brew kit from a Tesco supermarket (sorry to all you small independent retailers out there) for £25.99. It was a Youngs Brew Buddy Bitter kit. It contained a fermentation bucket, a siphoning tube to remove the brew to bottles or a barrel when finished, a can of extract to make the bitter, a hydrometer to measure ABV, a packet of yeast to turn the sugar into alcohol and not forgetting the sterilising powder to clean your kit thoroughly before using it.

Sugar

I realised when bringing my kit home that I didn’t have any sugar to be turned into alcohol, this would have been a bit of a brick-wall. So I popped into my local corner shop and settled for a bag of household sugar for a grand total of £1.29. Brewing sugar is available and is preferable as it gives a cleaner taste and is available online for around £2 a bag.

Bottles

It had not crossed my mind about what I should put my brew in at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to be able to store my beer for a while if needed and to be able to send it to friends. The only real choice is brown glass bottles. I was lucky enough to find somebody selling them locally for £12 for 40 bottles. You can ask your local pub to collect some Newcastle Gateshead Tadcaster Brown bottles or similar if you are on good terms with him/her.

Bottle caps

These are very cheap. I got 2 packets of 50 caps for £2 from Tesco (sorry again)

Bottle capper

To give my brew that extra je-ne-sais-quoi the only way to finish them off was with proper caps and something to seal them on. The capper cost £8 from Tesco too and is an ingenious invention (to someone like me who is very easily impressed)

Other costs incurred in brewing your beer

Apart from the above costs, the only real other expenses you could incur as a direct result of your brewing are water and electricity bills. You’ll need quite a bit of hot water in the sterilisation process for the kit and the bottles as well as boiling the kettle a couple of times to dissolve your ingredients at the start.

One of the biggest decisions you will be taking when making home brew is whether to bottle it or to put it into a pressurised barrel.  For me, there was only ever one choice and that was to bottle it…. so that it would last longer and so that I could send some out to my friends and spread the joy as it were.

It is a good idea to source your bottles well before you need them and give them a good wash out.  Your local pub will probably be happy to keep some for you as they generally have to pay to recycle them (I have not done this myself but I know other people have had success doing this).   You are always best off using brown glass bottles.  Glass bottles are less likely to react with your brew and the brown glass will prevent as much light getting to the liquid and damaging it.

If you, like, me don’t fancy going to the pub and asking, you can either collect your own (which would involve a lot of practice drinking) or you can buy them…. I was very fortunate in being able to find a seller on eBay who was selling just around the corner for me.  If you pay quite a lot of money for them, don’t worry as you’re to re-use them if you don’t give all of your brew away.  Then it might be easier just simply to buy beers with similar bottles to replace those you give away.

Before bottling up, it is absolutely critical to sterilise each bottle thoroughly, any leftover bacteria could ruin your beer and make it taste disgusting… you should use the appropriatie sterilising solution.

The brew then needs to be syphoned into the bottles, which is a pretty straightforward technique: Put your fermentation container as high up as possible so as to allow gravity to do all the worl, then simply place the syphoning tube in the container and attach it to container if possible.  Be careful not to disturb any sediment that has been left during the fermentation process.

Once each bottle has been filled, try to “pause” the syphoning by placing your thumb over the end of the tube (it is much easier if somebody is helping you!), or try to do as many bottles as you can in a row… basically it depends on the amount of space you have.

Once your bottle(s) is/are filled, another “must” is the “priming” sugar.  Your brew needs to be “primed” so that the small traces of yeast left in the brew will turn the remaining sugar into alcohol and aid in the carbonation of your beer.  Then you will need to put your caps on your bottles.  You can buy bottle caps from any good home brew supplier fairly cheaply as well as a manual device for sealing them.

You wil need to leave your beer for about 1-2 weeks depending on what kind of beer you’ve made and then after that, chill it to your liking and, finally, enjoy!

So my very first ever batch of beer was ready on Thursday, the 26th of August 2010.

Let’s get one thing straight.  I recommend that anybody reading this lower their expectations of what they expect to taste from their first brew.  I had notions of it coming out of the bottles tasting like some kind of ambrosia (and I’m not talking about lashings and lashings of Devon custard).

Alas, on the day after my brew was officially “ready”, I got home from work and stepped through the door with the proverbial spring waiting to taste my nectar of the gods.  I jumped in the shower and what not and then sat down to crack open my first ever bottle of real-life, genuine home brew.  I popped off my proper beer bottle top from my proper beer bottle, poured myself half a pint of my soon-to-be-confirmed beer and took a delicate sip.

A shiver shot up my spine and then back down again, and then I realised that my tastebuds had just tasted possibly one of the most disgusting, vomit-inducing tastes that the human pallet could possibly ever experience.  I could only really have explained the taste as stale bread and slightly alcoholic treacle.  Needless to say I wan’t best pleased.  Disappointment was followed by anger which in turn was followed by the question why? why me? Finally, the realisation dawned on me that after getting out of my aforementioned shower I had hastily brushed my teeth.  So I quickly rinsed any last trace of minty-ness from my mouth and approached my beer once more with trepidation.

This time it was as though, I was pouring it in slow-motion.  As the ale washed against the tastebuds, this time I could actually taste beer. I couldn’t believe it!  It was actually palletable!  So my initial fears of having 36 bottles of undrinkable beer were unfounded. I was able to drink another, then another, then another bottle of my ale.  Don’t get me wrong, it was no Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, but at least it was drinkable.  The fact that it was my baby too made it taste that little bit sweeter too.

I have overlooked the fact that I forgot to take a hydrometer reading when I started the brewing process, so the alcohol content of my brew can only be calculated on the scientific “how-drunk-can-you-get-off-3-bottles” method.  My experience over the past weekend led me to think that it my beer is a “somewhat” on this scale.

Before I start, the first thing that I should say is that I have never attempted to make my own beer at home before and this blog will chart the success (hopefully) and failings (probably) of a rank amateur’s attempts at home brewing and hopefully offer a little bit of advice as what (not) to do when making your own batches.

Although I would love to have been able to make my own beer completely from scratch from the raw ingredients, my initial thoughts were, “learn to walk before you can run”.   So instead of blowing hundreds of pounds on expensive brewing equipment, I thought it best simply to buy a starter kit, the like of which you can find in some big supermarkets as well as your local home brew store.  I would definitely recommend a local store not only to support your local business od course, but also they’ll actually be able to give you some advice on what you might need to produce your first batch.

In the end, I plumped for a Youngs Brew Buddy – Bitter starter kit which contained a 5 gallon bucket for the fermentation process, a tin of malt extract (which contains the raw ingredients all handily in a tin for easy usage), a packet of yeast, a syphoning tube and a hydrometer (er, yeah I didn’t know what it was for).  All I needed to buy after that was a kilogram of sugar and then something to put my beer in when it was finished.  The kit recommends that you buy brewer’s sugar, however I was quite sure that the guy in the local corner shop would not have had any in stock so I went for Silver Spoon!

So after adding all of my ingredients – I won’t give a running commentary as to how that is done since your kit would have all of the necessary instructions – I popped it on top of the washing machine and there it remained for a total of 7 days.  7 days was one day longer than my pack recommended but I had however not had the foresight alluded to earlier to get myself some sort of receptacle(s) in which to put it after the initial fermentation period had completed.  There are several options open to you here.  You can either purchase a barrel to put it in after it is finished in the bucket, or you can get hold of enough bottles to put it in.  Although a pressurised barrel would have been the easiest option, I decided I would suffer for my art and get some bottles.

I managed to get a great deal from a seller on e-bay who was offering 40 brown glass bottles for £12 so I bid, won them, and picked them up.  I couldn’t pick them up until exactly one week after I had begun my brewing so hence the 7 day wait.

When your brew is ready for bottling/barrelling, it is time use your syphoning tube.  If you follow the instructions on the packet, you will probably have no problems with this, and don’t worry if you get a moutful of your half-brewed ale and it tastes disgusting (at this point I should mention that I didn’t get a mouthful of ale and as yet am unaware as to the disgusting-ness of my brew).  So I syphoned it into my very cheap (and more importantly, newly sterilised) bottles of which I had 40.  So 5 gallons equals 40 pints and I have 40 bottles. PERFECT! Or so I thought… with no previous bottling experience, I had to take an educated guess as to the level to which I had to fill each bottle.  Needless to say, 40 pints of semi-brewed beer turned into 36 full bottles and 4 empty bottles.  The only logical explanation was that these 4 “missing” pints had been divided into 36 equal parts and now each of my bottles contains 1 and 1/9 of a pint.

Nevertheless, each of the bottles had to be “primed” with half a teaspoon of sugar and then capped for which I obviously had to buy even more sugar, bottle tops and a bottle capper.  Once done I popped them on top of the kitchen cupboards like this:

Will they explode? And how will they taste?

As you might have guessed by the caption of this photograph, I am currently worried that, with them each having an extra ninth of a pint in, they may in fact explode once any gas is produced.

It is apparently necessary to leave them for 2 weeks in order for the second fermentation to take place and for the liquid to become clear.  My 2 weeks are up in 4 days from the day of this post so I am hoping that I am past the point at which they may go boom.  But what do I know?  I’ve never done this before.

Oh, and by the way, I realised when bottling it that I hadn’t even used the hydrometer since I didn’t know what it was for, but after a little bit of research, I have found out it is used to test if your brew is ready for bottling (uh-oh) and it allows you to calculate the alcohol content of your brew.  This is done by taking a reading before and after fermentation and using the difference to calculate it somehow… but I’ll worry about that next time.  I would definitely recommend doing this of course!

So, watch this space.  I’ll let you know how it tastes in a couple of days.