Pre-hopped kit tweaks.

Has anyone every tweaked pre-hopped coopers and muntons kits? Looking to try some small tweaks for starters before moving on to more advanced stuff.

This is a great multipart article on improving kit beer's like coopers.

Improving Your Kit

It's from the Craftbrewer Radio site...the article is a companion to.

April#2,2007

The guys get “Down and Dirty” for the Kit and Kilo brewer with the simplist yet method of making a kit beer that tastes great. They also taste the underpitched beer experiment, and follow up on a brewers problem with under-atttenuation. Our beer superhero tries to save the love of his life - and Wonder-Mole, while we look into a beer belly experiment. More on how to say beer words, drink driving, beer laws and a quiz question will fill out the program, with a typical Aussie beer tale sung at the end.

Click to listen;
http://radio.craftbrewer.org/shows/April2-07.mp3

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I've added honey, coffee, vanilla, and dry hopped all of my extract kits. The SWMBO is getting pissy because I cant just leave my kits "how they come".

Very good advice on the above link. Just a moderate amount of steeping grains and subbing DME for sugar will make a difference.

Cool. I was going to add coffee to my stout kit.

How much coffee should I add to my coopers stout kit roughly?

Another question...how could I turn this into an oatmeal stout?

Anybody have comments? Wanted to make it tonight.

Forget that noise... just get unhopped extracts and add your own hops. Much more fun and versatile that way. I wouldn't call that a snobby opinion...its a fact. To be fair, Can tasty beer be created from a prehopped kit? Yes.

My opinion? Take a 5 gallon prehopped starter kit and make it into 3 gallons of beer. Voila! Imperial starter kit! Now you're on your way to awesome.

So anyway...any recommendations on the oatmeal?

Hey. Hope you haven't brewed yet. To get the oatmeal character you will need flaked oats. You can get these from a homebrew supply or you can just get some unflavored Quaker oats oatmeal. Not as effective as what you can get else where but its cheaper. 'bout 1.5lbs should do it.

universe said:

How much coffee should I add to my coopers stout kit roughly?

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roasted barley will give your beer a coffee flavor. It's strong stuff, so don't add too much or your beer will taste like something from starbucks. I would say maximum for your first try should be 4 oz. Coopers stoute may already have some roasted barley in it. If you want to be safe try 2 oz.

Here's what you do. Put the roasted barley in a grain bag and steep it on the stove in 150 F water. Add the water, not the grains to your wort.


Here's some other things you can try. Try adding some fruit flavor to Cooper's Wheat. I've done this and with both blackberry and raspberry flavors. I've also tried adding coriander and orange peel to the wheat to give it a blue moon taste. The result was that I had too much coriander and not enough orange peel. I've also tried dry hoping and adding extra malt to increase alcohol content. Here's another idea. Instead of using the yeast in the kit, try a specialty yeast for the style of beer your brewing.

Great info, thanks all.