Gone are the days when beer was a drink associated with giving people the signature bellies. Today, beer drinking has become its own culture with a variety in tastes and flavours - all thanks to the increasingly popular craft movement.
In addition to all the breweries that have their role in shaping this culture, there’s a special role that those who brew their own beer at home have. For a fan of this drink, the opportunity to do something fulfilling that brings about a tasty brew is certainly attractive. In addition to this presenting itself as a cheaper way to enjoy your favourite ale, it can also make your day-to-day life more interesting.
With the variety of homebrew beer kits nowadays, ranging in ingredients as much as prices, you can have fun experimenting with different types of beer and recipes, creating your favourite flavour or trying out something entirely new. Mastering the techniques is a rewarding experience, and you’d be amazed at the pride and joy you feel after a brewing job well done.
What Kit Do You Need to Brew Beer?
As you first get acquainted with the beer-making hobby, it becomes evident there’s more to it than acquiring the stater kit with the needed essentials in terms of equipment and tools. Along with going through the required buckets and suitable lids (with hole and grommet), brewing airlocks, or even thermometer, syphon, hydrometer, trial jars, beer paddles, pipettes, cleaners and sterilisers, bottles and caps, you need to make sure you have the right ingredients.
Types of Beer Kit
As there’s a range of ingredients and homebrew beer kits to choose from, let’s make things simple by separating them in different types of kits, which are:
The Basic Kit
If you’re looking for the most affordable option there is as you’re getting to know more of the hobby to see whether you enjoy it or not, the basic kits that consist of yeast and hopped malt extract are the perfect pick. They’re great because they come with simple instructions that are meant to be beginner-friendly, so the whole brewing process is pretty straightforward.
There may not be much to do, and you may not have much of a say in the brewing itself, but they’re a fun start to an adventure. They may not offer too much in terms of flavour either as they make for a less refined beer, and the less malt in them requires you to add more brewing sugar (around 1 kg) which additionally affects the flavour, however they’re great as you get the gist of beer-making.
You’ve got some solid options of brew making kit here, and the minimal setup for producing them consists of a basic fermenter, like a bucket with a lid, or a gallon glass jug, and airlock, thermometer, and a basic bottling setup.
The Mid-Range Kit
As the in-between option that’s neither basic nor premium, the mid-range kits provide you with more opportunity to experiment and enjoy the flavour, yet they’re still more affordable than the more expensive high-end. They usually come with more malt, which can be somewhere between 1.7 and 2.1 kg, as opposed to the 1.5 kg in the basic counterpart, and the additional benefit to them is that they’re more refined than the budget alternative.
This means that a lot more research and development goes into creating them, and even though you’d still have to use sugar (or malt extract in dried or liquid form) to give their alcohol content a boost, you can rest assured you’d experience a nice balance of flavours in the end. Cooper’s English Bitter, European Lager, and Real Ale are some examples of beer brewing kit options that produce the kind of beer you can expect to find in quality pubs.
Besides the Cooper’s home brew kit choices, there are Mangrove Jack’s too, from the Bavarian Wheat to the American IPAs. As you get to a more advanced beer-making setup, you’d have to expand your brewing capabilities with upgraded fermenters, like food-grade plastic fermenters or even stainless steel ones if you have the budget. Also, don’t forget the hydrometer, syphons, cappers and sanitisers.
The all-malt extract homemade brew kit option contains even more malt (up to 3 kg), and may be more expensive than the basic and mid-range but it requires no addition of sugar, and as such is more affordable in terms of the needed equipment thanks to the lack of boiling step. For more hop aroma or character, you could always add a bit more hop during the fermenting.
The High-End Kit
Once you advance more in this hobby, and you know what it is you want out of your ingredient combinations and flavours, you can upgrade to a high-end all-grain kit that gives you all the customisation flexibility, plus precision. These kits consist of premium-quality ingredients, and they even give you the chance to create custom recipes with ingredients of your choice.
These are kits that would give you a professional result, so it’s natural they require the investment in more top-notch equipment that’s built to last and can help you brew large batches at once. They may not be that expensive to begin with, however the requirement for this kind of equipment makes them more of an investment as there’s the traditional all-grain brewing process involved.
Brewing Methods
The kit with its ingredients is part of the deal of the brewing, and there’s also the type of brewing method you have to consider to get the whole picture of this hobby. As mentioned earlier, as a beginner you need something simple and straightforward, which is why most basic kits are based on the simpler form of extract brewing.
The whole deal with the simple process is that you get to skip the boiling, and just focus on the diluting of the syrup following the instructions. You can then move to the fermenting before the bottling. The more mid-range and complex extract homebrew beer kits are simply with syrup or powder malt extracts that allow you to skip the mash stage, although you may have to add hops in the boiling.
The most complex form of brewing is the all-grain where you brew with malt, following steps like mashing to extract the sugars from the malted grains, then rinsing and boiling. It may sound easy, but given that it’s the traditional brewing method, keep in mind you have to be careful with the steps and how you use the equipment, even though you may have the most flexibility to experiment with the brew.
