After our initial homebrewing success, we decided we wanted to step up our game! Brewer's Best has a line of homebrew kits perfect for newbies like us who want a bigger challenge than those straight extracts, but aren't quite ready venture out on our own with an all-grain recipe. We chose an imperial pale ale and got to brewing!
Kit Contents: These kits come with all the ingredients you need, pre-measured, along with grain bags and instructions. This kit uses extract for the base, but has you add special malts and hops for better flavor and more hands-on experience. A kit like this is still walking you through every step, but you get more of a feel for the whole process.
Our kit contained:
• Three Specialty Malts - Crushed Crystal Malt, Crushed Dextrine Malt, and Crushed Victory Malt
• Malt Extract - "Golden Light" malt extract (concentrated malt syrup) and a packet of dried malt extract
• Corn Sugar
• Hops - The kit used all Columbus hops, but they were separated into three packets to be added at different points during the boil for bittering, flavoring, and aroma purposes.
• Yeast - Safale US-05 Dry Ale Yeast
• Priming Sugar
The Process: We started out with boiling 2.5 gallons of water. As you can see, we'll need to invest in a bigger pot pretty soon! Once the water came to a boil, we steeped the specialty malts at around 160° for 20 minutes. The specialty malts were then removed.
Next, we brought the liquid (wort) back up to a boil and added in the malt extracts along with the first dose of hops. After 30 minutes, we added the second dose of hops, and after 55 minutes, we added the last packet.
Adding the hops at separate points in the boil like this affects the final flavors and aromas of the beer in different ways. Various compounds in the hops break down or are released depending on how long they've been cooked. To be honest, we're still a little fuzzy on the science of this!
Once the wort was finished boiling and all the hops had been added, all we had left to do was get it cooled down and mix it with some extra water to get about 5 gallons of total beer. We pitched the yeast and let it ferment away!
Original and Final Gravity: The original gravity of the beer (taken right after brewing) and the final gravity (taken after fermentation is complete) are used to determine your beer's alcohol content. Our original gravity came in at 1.070, a bit lower than the information in the kit instructions predicted.
Our final gravity at the time of bottling was 1.015. Using a handy formula, we determined that our alcohol by volume (ABV) would be around 7.2%. This is still a little lower than the kit predicted, but we were satisfied. Tinkering with the recipe to get an ABV closer to what you want is definitely possible, but that's still a little beyond our skill at this point. Baby steps!
Tasting the Finished Beer: It's hazy amber brown in color with a surprisingly decent head of tight foam. The aroma is floral and distinctly hoppy, and the taste follows suit. It's bitter and refreshing, with a good dose of thick malts to give it some body and balance the hoppiness. This is a fairly straight-forward beer without a lot of subtly or nuance, but the flavors are clean and crisp.
We definitely felt like giving ourselves a pat on the back for this beer! It's not going to win any awards any time soon, but it's been a good beer to come home to at the end of a long day.
Overall: For us, this kit was great for guiding us through the steps of mashing and hopping our own beer. We have a much better grasp of how it would be to start playing around with recipes or do an all-grain mash (using no malt extract). We were very pleased with the final product, too!
Have you done any of the Brewer's Best kits? Any other similar kits to recommend?
Related: Beer Guide: All About Pale Ale
(Images: Emma Christensen)
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Well, this is quite a coincidence. I'm bottling the same thing tonight! This beer is modeled (very directly) from Stone Brewing's Arrogant Bastard, and uses Columbus hops for bittering, flavoring and aromatics. The very high alpha acid they contain produce a big, bitter beer.
My abv is about 9.4 though, interesting then, that even with the same kit what you brew will always be entirely unique.
Cheers!
Congrats on your first homebrew! I can't think of any other kits to recommend, but I guarantee that once you start homebrewing, you can't stop....
There is a good chance that with that big of a difference in the initial gravity, you took an inaccurate hydrometer read. That could be do due the final wort not being properly mixed, or the reading being taken at the wrong temperature.
With an extract kit, it's hard not to hit the final gravity, assuming you used all the extract and your final volume was as the recipe specified.
I use Brewer's Best kits all the time. Right now I'm drinking the Witbier, which is a wheat beer (obviously) flavored with orange peel and coriander. I highly recommend it.
Nosy question: Are you using some Blue Moon bottles? Aren't they twist-offs? I've never used twist-offs, just the crown top bottles that are used for Sam Adams, etc. I understand that the twist-off bottles might not seal as tightly and air can get in and spoil your beer. Apparently there are thinner, more malleable caps available to use for screwtops, but I have never had the need to use those.
Happy brewing! It's a great hobby. I'm making a Scottish Red Ale tonight.
@trathbone - our initial gravity definitely could have been off. This was our first time using the hydrometer, plus I don't think we mixed the wort and the water quite enough (as you mentioned), though we did adjust for temperature.
@HomebrewMeister - Yes, there are a few Blue Moons in there, but they were regular crown-top bottles. We initially had a few twist-off Buds (gleaned from our neighbor's recycling, don't tell!), but yeah, the bottle caps didn't seem to fit as well so we weaned them out.
Must've just been a poorly mixed wort. Go ahead and mix it all up - the added oxygen is the other benefit there.
You seem to be progressing well, and challenging yourself - which is great. Your finished product has a great color to it. Get a bigger pot and keep it up! It's a fantastic hobby.
I recommend making your own kits. Finding a local brew shop that sells ingredients and put together something unique. The two best recipe's I've ever made were both based on Northern Brewer kits. One was a black lager and the other was a two hearted ale clone.
Also if you are brewing a lot it is much easier to keg the beer. A keggerator can be made using a small freezer and it is easier then bottling all those small bottles.
I've had great luck with Northern Brewer (http://www.northernbrewer.com/brewing), both for equipment and extract kits (I'm not up for whole grain yet). I have a St. Paul Porter fermenting right now. They have a very large selection of good extract kits. Also, they have an excellent website and cheap shipping for those not in St Paul, MN or Milwaukee, WI. The staff is also very friendly, they encourage you to call the store with questions.
Going all grain is a terrifying prospect, but not so hard once you set out to actually brew that way. Your beers will take a quantum leap forward when you do.
As far as the lower gravity, it may have something to do with the mash temperature. Enzymes stop converting the grain starches to sugar at higher temperatures, so next time maybe steep those grains at something more like 156 instead of 160. You'll still get the residual sweetness that the kit is shooting for, but you'll also get better conversion on the starches. It will also take into account if your thermometer was maybe off by a degree or two. Those things are ridiculously touchy.