Getting in the Christmas Spirit with Brewing Kits

Well Hey There Pardners,

This week we’re leaving all of that drab history and technical minutiae behind and talking about that greatest of American past-times: buying stuff (after taking a few Econ classes, though, I’ve had about a gallon of the Kool Aid - long live GDP growth, capitalism for life). Since it’s probably impossible to buy an experienced brewer anything at low risk (though honestly, there’s a silver bullet: fancy base malts), and since you probably know which snazzy beers to grab, we’ll restrict ourselves to Small Batch Homebrew Kits this week, and kibitz over their benefits.

They’re...well, they’re small

Smallness has always been one of my favorite qualities (I’ve always desperately wanted one of those tiny Japanese cell phones, for instance), and, while trying to brew great beer on the one gallon scale can be a monumental...challenge, let’s say, brewing one gallon for fun is way more fun than brewing five gallons for fun. Plus, for you the gift-giver, they’re decidedly cheaper - roughly $40 to a bigger kit’s $100, roughly. 

Why are the small kits good, price aside? They allow you to brew beer with no space at all, and with just that 8 qt Soup Pot that your giftee has lying around. Pretty slick. Plus, and I say this with an ocean of experience in the matter, one gallon of adequate or even questionable beer is super easy to drink; five gallons? I scoff at thee, scoff!

The basic requirements

There are three stages, broadly speaking, in brewing, and thus three sets of specialized equipment needed: that for the wort production stage, for the fermentation, and for packaging. Fortunately for the former, while there are obviously about a thousand bells and whistles you can buy, the core of a simple homebrewing setup would be a single soup pot. That’s it! 8 quarts! That, plus a mesh grain bag is literally all you “need.” 

For the fermentation side, you need little more - temperature control is a distant fantasy for a starter kit, so the central piece is a jug of some sort, maybe a plastic bucket. The trick, here, is not putting beer in, but getting beer out, since you have to gently remove the beer floating on top of the yeast without disturbing the yeast sediment on the bottom. We’ll talk about your options shortly.

Finally, there’s packaging - it goes without saying (at least given the kits available - mini kegs, really casks, would be a fascinating option now that I think about it) that a first-timer will be bottling, and the only complication there is applying the caps, if they’re not using Grölsch bottles (those green lads with the swing-tops - no, you can’t use the Ikea ones, they need to be able to hold pressure safely)

So, which one should you get?

Sweet, sweet capitalism. Like all things in life, the big variable here is money. A budget kit will work just fine, and in fact my favorite “cheap” kit is the exact one I first brewed on; its only flaw is its lack, not so much of a capper, but of a true auto-siphon (which is the chief way that homebrewers remove the beer from the yeast cake, the “trub;” it’s basically a primable gravity-driven pump that uses Bernoulli’s principle to move beer from high to low).

So, without further ado: kit number one. It’s lean, and I dig the kits, but in order to keep the price low, they rely on a bit of deft skill on your part to move beer from A to B (instead of priming a pump the easy way, they use an insane trick - if you fill a tube with sanitizer, then let gravity pull the sanitizer through, the resulting vacuum will also prime the pump, like starting a car in the 20s with a crank shaft). You can, of course, buy a capper - if you’re going to do so, your local homebrew store will probably sell you one for less than good ol’ BBS will, and you’ll earn some Homebrewing karma points while you’re at it

The next tier would be something like MoreBeer’s kit - it has literally everything you need, from the Siphon to the Capper, and that wide mouthed fermenter is a mile and a half better than BBS’s kind of lame classic moonshine jug. There are fewer recipe options, granted, but this is maybe what I’d buy for someone, and MoreBeer is by far the best homebrewing store in the US, probably anywhere, so a Gift Card would go a very long way.

Finally, there’s something like this Northern Brewer kit. Who needs a siphon when you have a sick siphonless fermenter? This setup most closely resembles what I use today, if in extraordinarily pared down form, and there’s a $10 discount right now making it a strong contender price-wise.

Conclusion

A fair question in all of this would be, is it all about the gear? Is the “quality” of the recipe somewhat secondary? At the level of skill your recipient is bringing to the table...yes. The beer is going to be adequate to decent, and so I’d recommend that you just pick a recipe whose style your giftee likes, and rock up to Christmas with the confidence that only a next-level gift can endow

(Oh, and the MacLeod connection? If enough of you ask I’ll, uh, assemble some King’s Taxes kits or something and sell them at cost)

Cheers,

Adrian “Um...you didn’t mention five gallon kits, like at all” Febre

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Like pebbles in a creek: parallels between Coffee and Mashing

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bottle