Listermann's kits/ when to add honey

Does anyone have opinions reguarding Listermann's ingredient kits. I'm thinking about ordering from them and would like to hear from anyone whose used them.

Another question, If I want to add honey to a batch should I put it in the boil?

If you go here: http://www.listermann.com/PDF/Index.asp

You can see the ingredients they use in each kit. From my memory, a good number of them use corn sugar as a fermentable. Its my personal preferrence, but in my experience I never created as good a beer when I used corn sugar as a fermentable (vs. just to carbonate) as I do now using all extract.

I've moved on to doing recipies from extract - but I'm giving kits one last try. My first three brews were kits. One was pretty good (an IPA, Brewers Best), one was not too good (a wheat, Brewers Best), one was downright awful (a porter, Listermann).

I have since made several brews from recipies that all turned out well. I am about to attempt one last kit - from Listermann, an ESB. For $25 or $27, if it is reasonably good, that is hard to beat - I end up paying just over 50 cents per beer. It arrives today or tomorrow - I'll definitely post early results in a 5 or 6 weeks. My guess - I am betting on mediocre, hoping for "pretty good."

I just would like to find a pretty good, cheap kit.

Another question, If I want to add honey to a batch should I put it in the boil?[/QUOTE]

Charlie Papazian suggests that you should boil the honey because it is a bee product that may contain any number of things (stingers, bee parts, whatever). But the problem with putting honey in the boil is that you loose the aroma.

So, in my oppinion, if you want to simply make your beer lighter and add a bit of flavor it is safer to boil the honey for at least 15 min. But if you want to keep that honey smell I would wait until you rack over to the secondary and add it then. The alcohol in there should help keep the nasties at bay. Since this will induce another fermentation you may need to rack again.


Any other thoughts out there?

This article explains a lot about using honey.
http://byo.com/feature/924.html