Brewer's Best Kits?
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Kits are kits. I don't think any are bad. You can make good beer or bad beer with any. But that's mostly on you as the person doing them than it is the kit.
Some might be less suited to the way you want to do stuff. But since we don't know anything about how you go about brewing or your level of experience I don't think we should guess about that.
Some might be less suited to the way you want to do stuff. But since we don't know anything about how you go about brewing or your level of experience I don't think we should guess about that.
The brewers best kits I used when I started were of good quality. I wouldn't be afraid to reccomend them to a new brewer. Hope that helps.
Thanks. I'm just figuring out which one to get. I've got an Irish Red from SoCo in primary now. I'm leaning towards their American Cream Ale.
Keep it simple at first, sounds like you're doing just that. Good call.
Cheers
Cheers
Yup until I get my skills down I want to stick with the kits. I'm also keeping them to small batches a gallon at a time. I figure after some practice sometime next year I'll branch out and try to tweak recipes a tad.
You spelled week wrong.
Kits are great due to the detailed instructions. One word of caution is to check the best by date on the box as well as the extracts and yeast.
Thanks, unless they fell out of date at the warehouse the dates shouldn't be a problem. I only plan to get them as I'm going to brew.
yeah, I don't mean make sure YOU use them right away. Kits by their nature can sit on a vendor's shelf for a while.
BrewnWKopperKat
ʘ‿ʘ
BYO's Big Book of Homebrewing, 1e (2017 /1/), p 19 has a technique for measuring the color (and therefore freshness) of LME. Basically, for a 5% ABV beer, create a OG 50 wort in a glass and view the color. (Properly boiled, fresh LME doesn't darken 'excessively').
/1/ There is also newer (2021? 2022?) edition of the book that I have not seen.
They are not a bad place to start, and I have brewed with a few of them, but I am not a huge fan. Maybe if you can get them very fresh, but they tend to sit out at room temp for months with aging LME, hops and yeast. They also tend to skimp a bit on ingredients, likely to reduce the overall cost.
Many homebrew shops will have custom kits or recipes (though maybe not in extract versions). There are several mail order vendors, like MoreBeer and Norther Brewer, that have excellent kits based on solid recipes with fresh ingredients and well written instruction sheets.
My post about a week was partly in jest but I started with kits like many do. I had done several kits and had read a bit about all grain and was put off by needing a special mash tun and a braid or manifold and a mash paddle, and then, having bought half a dozen extract kits I read about BIAB and bought a Corona mill and a paint strainer bag and set out making a 2 1/2 gallon batch all grain. It was very difficult to go back and use up the kits after having made one BIAB all grain batch. It was so easy to get started with the biggest problem i ran into with that first batch was that it was supposed to come out to 1.050 OG and mine was 1.070 into the fermenter.You spelled week wrong.
I started with Brewer's Best kits. Did a Tripel, a DIPA, a nut brown ale and a Brut IPA. They made perfectly nice beers that all my friends liked (although that last one is probably somewhat in the eye of the beholder).
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I don't know if those kit's do all grain or not. However I started out with the one gallon all-grain kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop and bought their ingredient kits for my next dozen or so beers before going out and buying bulk malts and hops for recipes I found online that looked interesting. I scaled those recipes back to the 1 to 2½ gallon batches I currently do.
This Jalapeño Saison was the first beer I brewed. And it was pretty good too.
https://brooklynbrewshop.com/collections/beer-making-kits/products/jalapeno-saison
But if you already have a fermenter and other stuff, then these ingredient kits are much less cost.
https://brooklynbrewshop.com/collections/beer-making-mixes
Many say you have to do extract for your first brews. But I don't believe that and would never have brewed a beer if I had to do extract. IMHO... The only thing that makes all grain difficult for the first timer is that malts and grains to make even a five gallon batch can be a lot to handle for a noob that has no experience. But a gallon batch is barely 2 pounds of grain to mash. So you can lift that easily with one arm.
Instructions for the BBS kits are very basic in instructions. But they will work if you follow them. Or you can try out a few of the more advanced things you read about here and elsewhere. I did my first as a simple version of BIAB and used a large hop sock to put the malts in.
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laurentobias
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Austin Homebrew has a handful of Cream Ale kits to choose from, in case you want variety.
Brewer's Best kits were all I used for the first 4 years or so. Never an issue. My local shop in Ft Wayne, IN kept a small stock & monitored dates very well, but could order kids not on the shelf when needed.
I used recipes after that mainly 'cuz we moved to El Paso, TX and BB kits just went available (presumable 'cuz the heat made shelf life *really* short. Then Galt, CA... suppliers we're few surprisingly.
We moved to the southern AZ desert & I'm using the local shop's kits. They actually check the dates as they sell 'em & replace items if they've been in the box a long time.
This coming year... back to modifying someone else's base recipes, but still using my local supplier.
I used recipes after that mainly 'cuz we moved to El Paso, TX and BB kits just went available (presumable 'cuz the heat made shelf life *really* short. Then Galt, CA... suppliers we're few surprisingly.
We moved to the southern AZ desert & I'm using the local shop's kits. They actually check the dates as they sell 'em & replace items if they've been in the box a long time.
This coming year... back to modifying someone else's base recipes, but still using my local supplier.
I’ve only used Brewers Best once. I won’t bore you with the details, but I ended up with a free, Brewer’s Best Altbier. It was months out of date, but all I had to lose was the water, propane, and time; why not? It actually made a very good beer. If I were not doing all grain, I would definitely use a BB kit again.
