Real Ales for the Home Brewer - recipes based on commercial real ale for the home & craft brewer

This page is just an overview on kits, sizes and hop & grain ingredients.

It is a long page so please if you want to skip to the ingredient part then click here (ingredients not yet written)

(if you mouseover the images you will see the names of the kits in the pictures)

Kits

Kits are a logical and easy entry into the world of home brewing. But which one to choose? There are hundreds of different kits aout there, and if you are really lucky then your local homebrew shop will stock most of them!

This section is going to assume you have bought all the equipment required.

So you've got some money in your pocket, a range of kits in front of you....which one are you going to choose?

You can narrow the field down by deciding on bitter, lager, stout, mild, cider etc.
Once you have decided on style, it is time to choose a kit type, size and brand.

Kits tend to come in 2 sorts:
Tinned - they just require you to open the can, pour out the malt and dissolve in boiling water (there is one exception though Hambleton Bard do a dry malt kit with no boil required).
These tins contain hopped malt extract. It is fair to say the bigger the kit the more malt but it isn't always fair to say the more you pay the better the kit (within a given size range)

Boil ups - as the name suggest require a 45 - 60 min boil on the cooker top
The boil up kits, in my view and experience, do tend to produce a better kit made beer but I appreciate they are not for every one.

Lets assume you have opted for the tinned kit....you now have a few more choices..
1.5kg - typical entry level kits (muntons, geordie, caxton, edme, telfords, youngs, hambleton bard)
1.8kg - 300g more malt and better quality (muntons, edme, john bull, titanic, kwoffit)
3.0kg - top quality kits (muntons, woodfordes, brupaks)

It depends on how much you can afford to spend which is going to be a factor in your choice, but all I can say is you are going to be saving a fortune compared to pub prices, so whilst a 3kg kit might initially seem expensive when you work out the cost per pint it is very economical and the taste will be superb.

Which brand......
Brands I did like a lot were Muntons, Brewing Products, Kwoffit, Telfords, Brewferm - all these seemed to give me superb results time after time, and were the most popular kits with customers as well.

Look at the ingredient panel of the kit. You might think why do I need to do that all kits contain malt extract with hops what more do I need?
In most cases quite true, but some kits used to have barley syrup added (barley syrup is barley which is malted chemically rather than naturally - it is cheaper to produce).
So if you had a choice of two kits at £8.00 and one had barley syrup, then the other one offers better value for money and in probability better quality as well. It has been 10 years since I last sold a kit so times & kits may have changed but it is worth looking out for - but remember if you have had a kit that contains barley syrup and you liked it then that is all that matters.

Ask your local shop which kits are popular with other customers, ask him what he brews - this is where a home brew shop beats a chemist or a supermarket hands down! The sheer scale of quality info you will get.

Please DO LISTEN to your homebrew shops advice, at times it might appear they are trying to sell you a more expensive product just for the extra bucks, but they want you to be a happy customer and to return. It simply isn't in their interest to sell you a one off expensive product and have you never come back.

For example, I always used to try and get brewers not to brew with just 1kg of sugar, it can really thin the taste of a beer out. So I used to try and get them to either buy 500gm of spray malt (dried malt extract) and use 500gms of sugar or to buy 1.5kg of plain malt extract and use in place of sugar. Yes this did cost about £2.00 more but it produced a far better beer and added just 5p to a pint.

Sterility is the KEY to success, if it comes into contact with your beer then sterilise it!

Water quality -
If you are lucky your water will be ok but sometimes you can pick up warnings from your tap! Seriously folks, if when you run cold water you can smell chlorine it is going to knacker your brew.

If you've ever had a beer that tastes of or smells of TCP then your water is probably to blame.

You have two solutions
1. Preboil all water - ok if your not mashing this might pose a problem with lack of boiler
or
2. Pour all the water you need the night before and let the water stand (covered of course) over night and give it a good stir. This lets the chlorine remove itself.

Once you have made a few kits, why not experiment a little, add some more malt, cut back on some sugar, add some dry hops to the barrel, add some hop oil, trying increasing the bitterness of a kit, try anything....that is the beauty of making your own ales, the world is your osyter and every kit a potential base for a recipe unique to you.!

Once you've got a few brews under your belt be adventurous......be a critic of the beer you are drinking and then improve on it...........how?

DON'T be afraid to experiment, if man hadn't experimented years ago then we wouldn't have beer today! :-)

You've just made a brew and like the taste but feel it could be a bit more bitter, next time boil up some hops & some of the kit extract together for 45mins. (only use small amounts of hops over each brew until you get the taste you require) or it might be the beer you've made is superb in taste, perfect hop level for you but lacking in aroma....add 20gms of Goldings to the barrel for a very hoppy aroma.
Maybe you want a slighier heavy body or more taste, cut back on the sugar and replace with an equal amount of malt extract and keep adjusting over successive brews

Want a stonger ale?....please don't just chuck another bag of sugar in - yep you'll get more alcohol this way but the taste will be so thin as to be yuck!
To be honest if you've heard horror story's of how horrible home brew is then it's probably because someone has just emptied another bag of Tate n Lyle in the fermenting bin and inflicted it on the person relating the horror story.

If you want that stronger brew then you have two options:
1. Cut back on the amount of water you add, instead of brewing 40 pints cut back to 35 or 30
2. use 1kg of sugar and 500g - 1kg of malt extract.

Dry kits

Not much choice on this front anymore by the look of it these days.
Youngs still do their Traditional Kit and Brupaks do a kit as well (well sort of their boil up doesn't need a boil just a steep in hot water)

Once you have done a boil up kit it is very easy to make the transition to brewing from ingredients and recipes (mind you not that it is hard for tin brewers to it's just you'll have done the first boil.)

Of course when you've made a few brews and want something else
then you could always brew a real ale recipe from Real Ales for the Home Brewer

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