Hot-rod Your Beer-making Kit!
Size doesn't matter, but the difference between homebrew magic and homebrew disappointment comes down to quality ingredients and smart technique. Try these tips (and our specially designed recipe on the opposite page) to get great results from your kit.
AS THE WINTER HOLIDAYS
shrink to tiny dots in the rearview mirror, the excitement and sensory overload that accompanied the stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day now give way to a new reality: It’s an awfully long time until Memorial Day. Getting through the next few months is going to take patience, perseverance, and a healthy dose of craft beer.
If you received a department store “brewery-in-a-box” starter kit (e.g., Mr. Beer, Coopers DIY, or the Beer Machine) as a gift over the holidays and brewed your first batch before saying good-bye to 2014, then you may have already sampled your initial foray into homebrewing. If not, you will very soon.
While these off-the-shelf kits are certainly easy to use and a good way to get into homebrewing, the resulting beer doesn’t always meet the expectations of today’s discerning craft-beer enthusiast. If after a couple of weeks of waiting, you’ve opened your first bottle, taken your first sip, and wondered why it tastes so, well, amateur, trust us: You’re not the first to be underwhelmed.
But don’t panic and don’t give up! Great beer is more about quality ingredients than it is about the equipment you use. Sure, certain equipment upgrades can make your brew day more efficient and let you make beer in greater volumes, but you can brew excellent beer using these mass-market kits. In fact, the inherent simplicity of such kits makes them a great choice for would-be homebrewers who don’t have a lot of extra space and aren’t ready to transform the spare bedroom into a science lab. The 2.1-gallon (8-liter) Mr. Beer fermentation vessel, for example, offers several advantages:
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▪ The unit’s small size is ideal for apartment dwellers and others with space constraints. The wide mouth makes cleaning,
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▪ sanitizing, dry hopping, and adding fruit a breeze. The fermentor’s unique geometry features sloping sides and a flat base to effectively collect trub, hops matter, and other sediment. The integrated spigot obviates the need to rack and makes bottling a piece of cake (attach a foot-long piece of sanitized tubing to the spigot to cut down on splashing when you bottle).
So why don’t these equipment kits enjoy a better reputation among seasoned homebrewers? I think it comes down to two things: snobbery and bad first experiences. Only a good dose of humility can chip away at the first of these (and even then, not always), but the second is easily remedied with a simple shift in perspective and process. With quality ingredients, these kits can turn out excellent beer with just few minutes more of your time.
Drink Fresh
a Picture the freshest, most delectable bread you’ve ever tasted. Imagine the dense chewy crust that gives way to a tender interior. Think of the yeasty, slightly tangy aroma and layers of nuanced flavor. I’m willing to bet that this loaf didn’t come from a storebought bread-machine mix. Yes, decent, perfectly edible bread can be made using a bread mix and a countertop machine. But much better bread requires quality flour, pure water, healthy yeast, a bit of salt, and some of your own precious time.
The same is true with beer. You might be able to make passable beer using canned-ingredient kits, but the number one way to improve your beer is to brew from fresh malt, hops, water, and yeast. If you’re ready to put your kit to the test and see what it can do, try our kit-scale pale ale recipe on the oppposite page.