Best Style Using Kits + Bits

[shwab]

You're using a kit and you blame it on the s-04?

Make some real beer with it before you go about blaming the yeast.

I love that yeast. Produces wonderful butterscotch esters when fermented at warm temperatures. I don't care if some people like it at 17 C to make a plain and boring alcoholic beverage. For me it doesn't get interesting and work like a real english bitter yeast unless fermentd nice and warm.

Oh yeah, and in my opinion stouts (and other dark styles) work best from kits because they cope better with the boiling down since there are already many roasted and caramalised characters in the beer.
Muntons, now repackaged as brewcraft, make an irish stout kit that comes out very drinkably.
I brew everything allgrain with the exception of stout, since it is the only decent beer I have ever seen from a kit.

 

[pint of lager]

The best styles for kits and bits are dark beers with plenty of extra roasted grains steeped as specialty malts and ales with lots of flavouring hops. Pale ales loaded with character hops such as an American pale ale style do well.

Make sure with any steeping that if it is specialty malts, not to steep it too hot, 30-50 degrees is fine. Do not squeeze the grain to extract every last drop of flavour, all you do is extract tannins. For 200gms of grain, steep in a litre for 30 minutes, strain the grain off, chuck the grain away and boil the resulting solution for 20 minutes to sanitise it. You can increase the volume of the boil and add some more malt extract and hops.

Some crystal grain and extra hops in any kit really help them along.

Styles that are base malt driven such as pilsners, lagers, Vienna lagers etc are not as successful with kit makers.

One of the best kit ales that I tried was a Coopers Heritage sparkling ale with 1.5kg of liquid malt and I suspect some extra POR hopbags as flavour and aroma.

For simple dump and stir the ESB fresh wort kits are dead easy.

 

[mycle]

My favourite kit brew is:

2x Coopers Stout Kit
100g or more to taste of Black or Chocolate Roasted grains
50g Goldings or Fuggles pellets
Yeast from kits (I once used a White Labs APA yeast and it worked well too)

Put the grains and hops in a really big coffee plunger and steep while you clean the fermenter and tip the kits in. Then plunge and pour into the fermenter. Fill to 19L and then ferment for 2-3 weeks at 16-18C.

Works a treat.

Mycle.