Coopers English Bitter Review

[CoTron]

I brewed this kit a couple weeks ago with the following ingredients:

1.8kg can Coopers English Bitter
1kg Muntons Amber DME
1 cup sugar
1/2 oz fuggles 5 min
S-04 Dry Yeast

15 min boil on DME and sugar. Added hops. Used wort chiller. Topped up to 6 gallons. Pitched dry yeast at 70f. Fermented in primary for 16 days at 70f. Primed with 1/2 cup sugar. Clear, nice and bitter at time of bottling. Nice solid yeast cake.

OG 1.046
FG 1.009
ABV 5%

Here's the review after 3 weeks in the bottle:

Clear, dark copper color. Light head with poor head retention. Medium to light carbonation. Well balanced bitterness that disappears into a smooth aftertaste. Not much complexity. Body is relatively light.

Overall I really like it. I think the bitterness is perfect. I'm glad I added the extra fuggles. Next time I would probably carbonate just a little bit more. I think the poor head retention might be partly because of not rinsing all of the soap off of the bottles before bottling.

 

[DaNewf]

I've only ever used the Cooper's English Bitter kit in partial mash recipes (LME and bittering hop addition) and the beers turned out pretty good. I can't see anything but goodness coming out of the recipe you used.

 

[unionrdr]

The amber DME will make it a bit darker. I used Munton's plain light DME in mine with EKG flavor hop addition @ 15-20 minutes. A 5 minute addition is for aroma. Not a bad thing though. And def try the english bitter with bbq!

 

[CoTron]

I dream about really good ribs all the time. The problem is that I'm working in Russia at the moment and only get BBQ when. Make it back to the states every year or two. That's why I'm brewing my own beer. Russian beer is terrible and all imported beer is really heavily taxed.

That's also part of the reason for doing amber dme, there are so many lagers available here but it's impossible to find anything with hops or anything darker.

 

[unionrdr]

Using plain light DME with the Cooper's English bitter can will give the correct color. That's what I use.