Cooper's Lager WTF

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waitito

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I made up a batch of Cooper's Lager the other week. My OG was way off, it was 1.060. My FG is 1.002. It smells a little like apple cider and taste like it has high alcohol. According to my calculator it will come in at about 7.7%. I double checked volume quantities for water as well as kilo to lbs on the table sugar.
ANyhow, I am going to make this same kit a second time soon. Has anybody else had this happen? Any ideas on exactly where I flubbed it?
 
Table sugar will give you the cider taste and smell i would bet that's where
 
The reason for the low FG and boozy flavor and cidery smell is due to the large amount of sugar in the brew.

I'm not a fan of coopers and have nothing good to say about their kits- but if you have the kit purchased and can't return it, I'd recommend skipping the sugar totally and using 500 grams of dry malt extract instead of the sugar and fermenting it at 65 degrees as an absolute highest temperature. that would help alot with making a better beer.
 
How much sugar did you use? Coopers recommends using the brew enhancer which is essentially DME.
 
I fermented at 69F. I used 3.3 lbs sugar. I'm going to brew it again but this time I'm going to use DME. Thanks

I thought they used a kilo of sugar usually (2.2 pounds) and that's way too much. If you used 3.3 pounds of sugar, that would explain the poor result. I think it's only about 3.3 pounds of malt extract in those kits (which are poor kits to being with), so that's 50% malt and 50% sugar- pretty gross.

Using malt extract instead of sugar will be a huge improvement, even though the prehopped coopers extract and their yeast is still poor quality. If you want to continue to make beer, I'd suggest using better quality kits and keeping them under 65 degrees during fermentation. There can be excellent beers made from good quality kits.
 
Fermenting a lager at 55°F will yield much better results. If you are limited by temperature you might want to look for an ale kit.
 
Fermenting a lager at 55°F will yield much better results. If you are limited by temperature you might want to look for an ale kit.

True, but Coopers Lager kits are ale kits that recommend fermenting at 20C or thereabouts. Lager is just a word in the name, and they don't make anything resembling a lager.

They aren't lagers, and they come with a cheap yucky cooper's yeast that makes the beer taste woody.
 
True, but Coopers Lager kits are ale kits that recommend fermenting at 20C or thereabouts. Lager is just a word in the name, and they don't make anything resembling a lager.

They aren't lagers, and they come with a cheap yucky cooper's yeast that makes the beer taste woody.

True that.

Though I did have a glass of their 'ipa' recently which resembled decent beer. Not great, but surprisingly not bad. Not an IPA, but a decent light pale ale. Maybe it was the brewer, but what the hey.
 
Yooper said:
I thought they used a kilo of sugar usually (2.2 pounds) and that's way too much. If you used 3.3 pounds of sugar, that would explain the poor result. I think it's only about 3.3 pounds of malt extract in those kits (which are poor kits to being with), so that's 50% malt and 50% sugar- pretty gross.

Using malt extract instead of sugar will be a huge improvement, even though the prehopped coopers extract and their yeast is still poor quality. If you want to continue to make beer, I'd suggest using better quality kits and keeping them under 65 degrees during fermentation. There can be excellent beers made from good quality kits.

I agree, I've found that the brewers best kits make a damn decent beer! You can make little changes and add things to them and they turn out quite nice... Hey look I'm drinking an IPA from a BB kit right now!
 
The Cooper's OS lager can comes with ale yeast. But the others,like the Thomas Cooper's Select Heritage lager is a true lager. The OS lager version does fine at 65-69F. I use some Cooper's cans as a base with either partial mash or DME & hops. Makes a better beer. The WL029 ale/kolsh yeast is working out pretty good so far. Can't wait till both batches are ready. Bottled the dark lager today.
 
My first batch was with Coopers Lager, added 1/2 of the brew enhancer and 1kg of DME and 1 oz of cascade hops, all in all it came out pretty good for a first batch, enjoyed it!
 
I agree that even with the whole box of brew enhancer,the OS lager def needs some flavor hops to round it out nicely.
 
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