why are kit instructions so horrible ?

[IanC]

Hell when my friend went into out local brew supply shop and said I am NEW what do I need. He sold him an incomplete kit. No auto siphon, bottling bucket, thermometer, spoon and other not so vital parts. But the worst is he put a recipe together for him and just wrote it on a piece of paper. Steep x for x long no temp mentioned. Boil x add x add x cool, pitch yeast. No mentioning of start up, aeration nothing. He didn't even crush the grains or tell him that they needed to be crushed so the were not! The best advise I found was in palmers book. Too bad I had 3-4 brews going before I got the book! I would expect it more from an online store but a local shop thats just bad.

This was exactly my experience. Nice guys in my local shop, but even with my credit card in hand, explaining that I'm a first timer and me asking "Is there anything else I need?" they still still send me on my way w/o all the things I needed (things actually sitting on their shelves). Plus the recipe was incomplete. It's a head scratcher. But still... the beer turned out ok in the end so it's all good. It's just that if it were me, I'd take a more interested approach in new brewers. They'd make more money up front and be more likely to get a repeat customer.

 

[gr8shandini]

I guess it depends on the kit, but the directions on the one I started out on were OK. As was mentioned earlier I think the main thing that the kit manufacturers don't want to do is make it sound too hard or like it will take too long. I read Palmer three times before I even thought about going to the LHBS, but I'm an engineer and just have that sort of personality. My girlfriend occasionally brews with me now, but if she was on her own, she would have dropped Palmer like a hot rock the first time she saw an equation.

So will the directions that come with the kit make the best beer possible from that set of ingredients? Not at all. But will it make better beer than a new brewer thinks is possible from their own kitchen? Certainly. And that's the whole point. Once you've got 'em hooked, people will seek out the level of information they think they need. I know a guy who's been brewing for 20+ years. When I asked him some advice about adjusting a hop schedule, he said "I just buy kits and do what they say." It's not a bad thing. It makes him happy and who can argue with that?

The only thing I would do differently is give a section on troubleshooting. The time frames they give aren't impossible, but that's if you do everything correctly. They should advise people to taste the beer before bottling and wait another week if it tastes funky, then taste again. That way, they can advertise that you'll have beer in 21 days, but also not have people freak when their beer tastes like ****. And you can also give folks a heads up on how to correct the problem in the future.

 

[Jerrycan1]

I taught my four year old daughter how to make beer from a kit. She enjoyed it immensely...not the beer, the "doing". She couldn't read yet, and I had to explain it to her in terms she understood. I also taught my brother-in-law how to make beer from a kit. While the instructions that I gave to my daughter would suffice for my brother-in-law, I chose not to approach it the same way. Did I use the instructions that came with the kit......well.....no....not in either case.

But I did use them when I made my very first batch, and it came out spot-on. Its an individual thing.

I also bought a complete Spagnols kit from the supermarket that had EVERYTHING in it, INCLUDING a more detailed INSTRUCTION BOOK.

There is also a worldwide shortage of competent minimum-wage flunkies. Hobby brew shops can't find good pleople these days. If the person you talked to walked you through the whole process and recipe, showing you the tools along the way, nothing would have been missed. In the last ten or fifteen years or so, people don't learn or teach this way anymore...they just go on-line and google it.

But what's with this BLEACH thing? What's the concern?
Bleach kills yeast and bacteria. Bleach decomposes and vaporizes (hence the odour). Household bleach is chemically the same product that is used to treat drinking water in about 90% of the world (yes! You have drunk bleach!...possibly as much as 5 liters of bleach out of every ten tons of water). Bleach is used in almost all restaurant dishwashers. I don't let my child play with bleach (or my wife...for the same reason, believe it or not....the cost of clothing), but I don't let them play with Saniton either.
What's wrong with bleach?

 

[Revvy]

What's wrong with bleach?

Besides the fact that there are so many better NO RINSE WET CONTACT sanitizers in the market now, including products like starsan in which the foam actually becomes yeast food, the bigger problem with using bleach on a regular basis, while at the same time using municipal water, certain minerals in whatever water you use and certain plastics, is that you could build up chloramines in your brewing systems, which could contribute to off flavors in your beer.

In some situations they work cumulatively by having little bits of chlorine in different parts of the brewing process that your beer may come in contact with, and it builds up and bammo plastic band aid flavor.

It's best to avoid chlorine as much as possible, and in the case of sanitizing ONLY in the most dire situations, like where you know for sure you have an infection.....we call it slash and burning.

I try to limit the amount of contact my gear comes to chlorine and chlorine products.

Chloramines are funny that way, some folks aren't affected, and in other situations the right combination causes issues.

And unfortunately my understanding is that folks have little control over is their setups can handle it. I've heard of folks being successful for years with it, then they replace one piece of gear like their autosiphon, or move and change water sources, or have new plumbing put in, and suddenly they have them now.

 

[noggins]

...the first kit i used said to use BLEACH to sanitze

I've used nothing but diluted bleach for 6 years....what am I missing?

i guess i shoulda kept reading....oh well, thanks for the info revvy but i'll keep on using good ol clorox.

..mods, feel free to delete this post as it is useless...

 

[emjay]

Besides the fact that there are so many better NO RINSE WET CONTACT sanitizers in the market now, including products like starsan in which the foam actually becomes yeast food, the bigger problem with using bleach on a regular basis, while at the same time using municipal water, certain minerals in whatever water you use and certain plastics, is that you could build up chloramines in your brewing systems, which could contribute to off flavors in your beer.

In some situations they work cumulatively by having little bits of chlorine in different parts of the brewing process that your beer may come in contact with, and it builds up and bammo plastic band aid flavor.

It's best to avoid chlorine as much as possible, and in the case of sanitizing ONLY in the most dire situations, like where you know for sure you have an infection.....we call it slash and burning.

I try to limit the amount of contact my gear comes to chlorine and chlorine products.

Chloramines are funny that way, some folks aren't affected, and in other situations the right combination causes issues.

And unfortunately my understanding is that folks have little control over is their setups can handle it. I've heard of folks being successful for years with it, then they replace one piece of gear like their autosiphon, or move and change water sources, or have new plumbing put in, and suddenly they have them now.

Most drinking water is loaded with chloramine these days since it's more stable than chlorine (hence, the need for campden tabs, as opposed to just boiling the water or letting it sit out overnight).

Not to be pedantic, but you're obviously referring to chlorophenols, a reaction product of phenol compounds (like those created by yeast) with chlorine-based sanitizers (like bleach). They can impart pretty unpleasant tastes often described as medicinal (or band-aid, as you put it.)

I think they can be pretty well-controlled by not going overboard with the bleach and rinsing very well with water (boiled, of course.) The main reason people still use bleach is obviously cost, but a spray bottle with StarSan is efficient enough to end up costing pennies per batch. It's also just way less of a hassle, and has such a huge tolerance for inaccurately measured concentrations (in terms of the efficacy of sanitation, safety to use and even consume, and the near impossibility of affecting flavor) that using StarSan seems like an absolute no-brainer. I can already brew some batches for less than $2/gallon when ALL costs are considered - and that is without any economies of scale, since I'm still brewing 5gal batches (meaning I can produce 5gal for less than $10, depending on the batch.) The disadvantages to using bleach just really don't make it worth saving a couple of cents per batch for me.

 

[nebben]

It's a good thing HBT doesn't sell brewing kits directly. It would cost a **** ton to print out the thousand or so mostly the same/but slightly different sets of instructions, according to HBT members.



That is all for now.