I'm afraid my response might be a little long, so let me preface it with a summary.
The 3 best things you can do to improve the quality of your beer are:
1) Practice good sanitation;
2) control the temperature of fermentation well;
3) Don't rush things--anything after you pitch yeast, you're better off letting it go twice as long than one day too short. If your kit says "leave it to ferment for a week", 2 weeks is better than 6 days (and probably better than one week).
Thanks for the prompt reply!
I took it for granted and forgot to say that I'm brewing using a canned constituent for dummies like me
Okay, you're doing extract brewing with a pre-hopped extract. That's a perfectly fine way to ease into brewing. I'd recommend after you're comfortable with it you consider buying 15g or so of hops pellets of an appropriate variety of hops (my brain is struggling hard to make sure I speak metric) to add briefly at the end of the boil and give your brews a fresher hops aroma. Later on you can move to buying un-hopped malt extract and using hop pellets with it.
But for now, you're doing a pre-hopped extract, and you can make decent beer that way.
So what I did was (following the instructions in the Coopers homebrew kit booklet): sanitise the bin with the sanitiser from the same brand and all the equipment, rinse and let drain; soften the content of the can in warm water for 10min or so; pour the content of the can in the bin, add 1kg of brewing sugar, add 2 liters of boiling water and stir for 2-3 min; add 20 liters of cool water then stir again, top with the yeast, close the lid, secure the airlock and fill it in halfway with sterilised water, so I am not sure about what follows:
This is a very short boil, which is fine--with fresh hops you'll need to boil longer (up to an hour) but with your method it works okay.
For the purposes of your question, though, the important thing is that you mixed the extract with 2 liters of water and mixed thoroughly. Then you added cool water.
That's likely to result in a final wort that isn't totally mixed up, with the dense stuff you boiled separating out from some of the water you added later. Over a couple of days, it'll mix fine (so no worries on the final beer result), but it can throw off your OG reading significantly. You probably got a sample with more water and less wort, which explains why your OG seemed low.
Does that make sense? Basically, a gravity reading requires very evenly mixed wort (or beer).
I didn't sanitise the water for the ice. I wasn't expecting the initial temperature to be so high, so I just chucked some ice in the wort because I was afraid the yeast could die otherwise. Then I added the yeast.
You're better off waiting a while for it to cool or finding a sanitary way to help it--the ice could have nasties in it. If you move to unhopped extract + hops, you'll wind up with the same problem only worse (9+ liters of 100C wort to cool--basically, you fill a sink with ice water, set the pot in it, and stir for 15-20 minutes to get it below 24C or so)
But 9 times out of 10 it won't make a difference, so don't panic--your beer is probably fine.
Still, good sanitation is important to save you a big letdown the other 10% of the time. Essentially, when the wort is boiling it'll sanitize itself. Once it's cooled down at all (doing math: it needs to be at 71C for 5 minutes or so to pasteurize, so below 71C it's "cool") then you should make sure that nothing that hasn't been sanitized (with StarSan, iodophor, or the like) touches it.
The kit's instructions suggest I wait 4-6 days before bottling, then check the FG over two days: if it's stable, I can bottle.
You can. Stable over 3 days is better, since sometimes things slow down enough that it's not obvious over 2 days but it's still going a bit.
I'd recommend waiting 2 weeks; once it's done fermenting, the yeast will still do it some good cleaning up off flavors. It's always hard to wait, but almost every beer gets better with more time conditioning.
Also they suggest the temperature be in the range between 17-27C for the yeast to work effectively.
Do you still suggest I ignore these instructions and follow your suggestion to pitch and ferment at lower temperatures, considering we're talking about canned constituents, which probably wasn't clear in my previous post?
Most kits' instructions are sort of "here's the easiest way to make beer", not "here's the way to make great tasting beer".
At 27C the yeast will work, but it's warm enough that it'll be a lot more likely to produce esters (fruity flavors, especially banana-y) and fusil alcohols (beer that tastes like cheap moonshine/hot alcohol).
If you can get the temperature down to 18C or lower, you'll be more likely to make a better-tasting beer.
BUT, it'll take longer to finish. Anything 15-18 is ideal taste-wise but you're probably looking at 2 weeks to finish up (although, as always, the hydrometer is the ultimate guide to when it's done).
Cooper's (and any other simple kit manufacturer) wants things to look quick and easy for people, so their recommendations are for the faster way of getting it done.
Also what do higher or lower gravity readings reflect? The FG is apparently stable, and hence the beer ready to be bottled, but higher than expected: what does this imply?
The yeast was a little less viable (old or exposed to heat or whatever), or the extract wasn't totally fresh, or the temperatures weren't ideal, or whatever.
With the higher finishing gravity, your beer is likely to be slightly sweeter than the goal, and have slightly less alcohol.
1.014 is an okay finishing target, though; it's not likely to be incredibly sweet.
Incidentally, I can recomment John Palmer's book "How to Brew" very highly--especially because you can read it online for free at
How to Brew - By John Palmer - Introduction The very last chapter has a section "Is my beer ruined" at
How to Brew - By John Palmer - Common Off-Flavors and
How to Brew - By John Palmer - Common Problems that is quite useful for troubleshooting problems. (if you like the book well enough, you could buy a copy to support the author and get the new version).
It's more focused on making great beer (rather than fast and easy beer) than the instructions in most kits are.
