"cheap" Kits Vs "dearer" Kits And Extras?

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michael_aussie

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I'm not a total tight arse (well actually I am), but I love my beer, so am prepared to pay more if I get an imporved product.

I have been brewing mainly "Dark Ale" from Tooheys and Coopers. Primary because these are the kits available at Coles and Woolies (Safeway), and these are always cheaper than the kits available at the two local HB shops near to me.
To be honest, although each brew batch differs slightly, I am unable to pick the difference between Tooheys and Coopers, although, I haven't yet done a trianglar blind test.

I have also tried a kit from Brewcraft (Newcastle Brown), that was good.

I am currently brewing:
BASIC CHEAP OPTION (roughly $17) Tooheys Dark Ale with Coopers Brew enhancer 2
SLIGHTLY DEARER OPTION (roughly $21) Tooheys Dark Ale with Cellar Plus Dark Brew Booster # 12
ROLLS ROYCE OF KITS OPTION (roughly $33) Morgans Iron Bark Dark Ale with Brewcraft Beer kit converter (dark lager #64)

I'm trying to see if the extra $$ spent on the Cellar Plus is justified (about $4 extra), and whether the extra $$ spent on Morgans with the Brewcraft converter (about $16 more than BASIC CHEAP OPTION) are justified.

I'm hoping they are.

If I can taste a difference I am more than happy to spend the extra money.

What are your comments about price versus quality for the up market products???
 
Tooheys are on special at Woolies for about $8 at our local branch at the moment. My Coopers Stout Headbanger toucan + kilo LDME + kilo DEX came in the top half of the field in Russian Imperial Stouts in the National comps last year - if I get in there this year I won't be repeating the experiment as they would have to kill me.

B)
 
I've always found that the more expensive a kit brew I put down the better it was. Not because paying more for a tin buys a better beer but because that extra money spent reflects the extra ingredients bought and thus more work went into the beer. If you're drinking the standard Coopers Dark Ale and enjoying it then I'd stick with that. A few extra bucks in your pocket and a beer you like in your fridge. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.
 
I read some posts about Muntons, so I found an online shop that sells it and bought a Muntons Connoisseurs Mt Mellick Cream Ale 1.8kg. Asked the shop what would be nice with it and added some crystal grain and number 20 ultra blend.

Not sure if it was the tin or what, but it has only been in the bottle for 2 weeks and it is very nice. So smooth in the mouth feel.

It is $26 a tin, but I was that impressed that I have bought enough for 2 more batches.
 
i've made a munton's connosieur Bock and it was fantastic, very mouthy, and very morish.

however i found the euro lager and Yorkshire bitter from the same range decidely average at best.
 
My thinking is that the more extras you add to a kit the less contribution the kit makes. You can either spend more money and get a kit with more extras already built in, or you can get a cheaper kit and add the extras by steeping some grain and doing a small hop boil. The second method gives you more control, is more fun and ultimately produces a better beer IMHO.
 
I tried the Munton's Highland Heavy with a Morgan's Fuggles bag chucked in and S-05 yeast (harvested from previous trub and literally chucked in). Worked out a total cost of $43 I think.

While it may be more bitter and darker than BJCP style, I can say it the peaty, mossy malt flavours are eerily like brews i've had in Scotland. There's nothing like being transported by your tastebuds :D

To the OP - i'd say for the sake of what is really a few bucks, splash out and try different things. You may be happy with what you've got ... but you won't know if you're happier with something else until you try it.
 
I've done a Tooheys Special Draught with BE2 and S-05 yeast. It comes out as quite a reasonable drop. The megaswill drinkers like it as it similar to what they are used to drinking.

I used to give the megaswill drinkers something like Dr Smurto's golden ale but while they gave you the usual comments of "its nice or its not quite as I expected" , they weren't too keen on another glass. I think that they get so used to drinking these Australian Lagers (VB, Hahn Ice, Tooheys, etc) that their palatte isn't used to real ale full of flavour and aroma. Now with this little kit beer, I can gently lead them down the path to homebrewing.

I find the use of better quality yeasts also helps the cheaper kits provide a better tasting beer. And itsn't hard to harvest the yeasts at the end of a brew to use in the next.

I've done the Coopers dark ale with BE2 and S-04 and it tastes similar to Tooheys Hunter Old (or how I remember Hunter Old tasting as it is just about impossible to get in Vic).
 
all in kegs ...I tried tooheys draught in a can...
then
tried ezy brew fresh wort pure blonde and Little creatures pale ale ...both $34.00 each.

ezy brew is easier.. as in you don't need to add dextrose and the quality is far superior to the can ( which I ended up tipping out ).
I just got a brewers choice fresh wort Amarillo Ale to try...it was $39.00.

I have shocked non home brew fans with the quality.
So much so they are all planning on coming around to watch the 3rd state of origin and drinking all my beer.
 
The beers I've made using Tooheys kits (when i was brewing kits) where all chucked out, they are just poor quality, and although they could probably be spruced up its worth paying a couple extra bucks for coopers top quality products (and no i'm not a coopers rep). Strongly suggest your next batch you should try something different again, for a good price too...

21L Batch

1.7kg Coopers Dark Ale Kit
1.5kg Coopers Amber LME
0.25kg Dextrose

Safale S04 for pommy style
Safale US05 for american style

$25 - $30 depending on where you buy your product
___________________________________________

And for an even better beer I'd suggest adding roasted barley or chocolate malt to your dark beers, it's piss easy and you will get a beautiful roasty aroma and flavour from it that cannot be achieved with kits the same.

If you like your dark ales you should deffinetly buy a Kilo or 2, usually only cost about $5.80 a kg and you only need to use about 250g a batch depending on what kit and extracts your using it with.

so the above recipie could be changed to...

21L Batch

1.7kg Coopers Dark Ale Kit
1.5kg Coopers Wheat LME (Good using this can as the wheat gives good head and thins the beer a little in place of dextrose)
0.25kg Chocolate Grain (500 EBC)
___________________________________________

Give it some thought mate, it's just the kind of advice I needed when I started brewing, hope your beers turn out good none the less!
Moral of my story is adding special grains for colour flavour and aroma is a much better step up then spending more on kits
And then ofcourse adding extra hops will make a huge difference too, but i wouldnt worry about that just yet making dark ales.

Drew
 
Boy they sell a bunch of the cans so they must be good. I say look for the sell by or use by date and if it is fresh brew with it.

You will most likely will do better using fresh extract with grain and hop additions then using kits.

It all comes down to if you are happy. If you have friends over and they leave because the beer is gone then you are doing something right.

I am a beer snob. I like good beer. I dont give a rats ass how it is made as long as it tastes good and does not give me a headache.

Far as I know Rats ass is an American term.
 
Thank you for everyone's input.

Although the "basic" beers I have make so far are very drinkable, I am very keen to raise the bar.

Drew, I'll certainly take your advice on the roasted barley and chocolate malt.

And for an even better beer I'd suggest adding roasted barley or chocolate malt to your dark beers, it's piss easy and you will get a beautiful roasty aroma and flavour from it that cannot be achieved with kits the same.

If you like your dark ales you should deffinetly buy a Kilo or 2, usually only cost about $5.80 a kg and you only need to use about 250g a batch depending on what kit and extracts your using it with.
....Drew
 
The beers I've made using Tooheys kits (when i was brewing kits) where all chucked out, they are just poor quality, and although they could probably be spruced up its worth paying a couple extra bucks for coopers top quality products (and no i'm not a coopers rep). Strongly suggest your next batch you should try something different again, for a good price too...

21L Batch

1.7kg Coopers Dark Ale Kit
1.5kg Coopers Amber LME
0.25kg Dextrose

Safale S04 for pommy style
Safale US05 for american style

$25 - $30 depending on where you buy your product
___________________________________________

And for an even better beer I'd suggest adding roasted barley or chocolate malt to your dark beers, it's piss easy and you will get a beautiful roasty aroma and flavour from it that cannot be achieved with kits the same.

If you like your dark ales you should deffinetly buy a Kilo or 2, usually only cost about $5.80 a kg and you only need to use about 250g a batch depending on what kit and extracts your using it with.

so the above recipie could be changed to...

21L Batch

1.7kg Coopers Dark Ale Kit
1.5kg Coopers Wheat LME (Good using this can as the wheat gives good head and thins the beer a little in place of dextrose)
0.25kg Chocolate Grain (500 EBC)
___________________________________________

Give it some thought mate, it's just the kind of advice I needed when I started brewing, hope your beers turn out good none the less!
Moral of my story is adding special grains for colour flavour and aroma is a much better step up then spending more on kits
And then ofcourse adding extra hops will make a huge difference too, but i wouldnt worry about that just yet making dark ales.

Drew

This is one thing I have lots of experience on - years of Kit & Kilo (esp in Dark Ales) and then extract plus steeping grains.

With the kits, for a dark beer, either the coopers or the other higher quality kits. Use grain, the quality increase over using malt powder is incredible. I soaked (when you are all grain, it's called steeped or mashed) the chocolate grains for 30 minutes. I put a sieve over the mouth of the fermenter and pour the liquid and the grains into the sieve, grains go into the sieve and I pour hot and then cool water through the grain to make up the volume. Not technically correct (I'm now onto all grain), but I did this over and over and made some fantastic K&K beers. Brown sugar is always a welcome addition and for flavour adjuncts I used aniseed, cardamom, cloves. Not telling you how to do it, but one thing I did well whilst on K&K was dark ales.

Ideally, your progression can be:

Kits
Kit & Kilo
Kit & Kilo using grain - until your recipes are downpat
Extract (i.e. unhopped goo - kits are hopped goo), buying separate hops (sometimes 2 lots of extract)
Extract, hops and grain
All grain

I went 12 years all up to get through the first 5 stages, because step 6 seemed way too hard to understand. Then after coming across this forum, I came across Nick_JD's "going all grain for less than thirty bucks" guide - brew in a bag. No major equipment upgrade, all pictures explained everything and the beer is fantastic. If I'd had a guide like that earlier, it would not have taken me 12 years to work through stage 1-5.

Kits are great, I'm never going to slag off those who use them, because I did for so long. They are great as a leg-up to brewing. But treat them like a stepping stone. I wish that 12 years ago, a resource like the AHB forums existed, because it is the best thing to ever happen to my brewing. Progress through the above stages, you pick up lots of experience and you get a taste for what you can create. And if you are worried, Dark Ale are the most forgiving for going all grain.

For the record, I just put down the following Dark Ale:


0.20 kg Belgian wheat Grain
0.25 kg British chocolate malt Grain
0.25 kg Brown sugar, dark Sugar
0.75 kg German pilsener Grain
0.50 kg German wheat Grain
0.20 kg Honey Sugar
0.25 kg Rye malt Grain

30.00 g Amarillo Pellet at 30m
15.00 g East Kent Golding Pellet at 15m
15.00 g East Kent Golding Pellet at flameout
15.00 g Nelson Sauvin at flameout

1.00 pack British Ale yeast (Windsor)
100.00 ml Cherry Extract
 
Some kits benefit from extras, some don't. I'd be more inclined to try and spice up a basic lager kit than add too much to a decent stout kit for example.

Throwing expensive stuff at expensive kits doesn't necessarily make better beer any more than throwing expensive grain at an AG necessarily makes better beer. Ingredients are there for a reason. Like with cooking, it's at least as much how you use the ingredients as to what they are.

What they are is important, yes but it is possible to take bresse pigeon, perigord truffles and saffron and make an inedible waste of money.
 
Lord Raja,
did you boil the liquid that came from soaking the grains at all, or just soak, and straight into the FV?
thanks
 
Lord Raja,
did you boil the liquid that came from soaking the grains at all, or just soak, and straight into the FV?
thanks

I didn't boil, just steeped.

Technically from an AG point of view, this isn't correct. But the majority of the fermentable sugars were in the kit (or unhopped extract), so no issue. I just poured the grain and its soak water into the fermenter through a sieve and then ran hot water through the grains in the sieve to get the rest of the sugars out of it (I've since found out that this is called sparging).

The other thing to note is that if you are doing your own hopping (which I did in the grain) and making a stout/porter, to use a small amount of a decent high AA% hop. Don't waste your time with noble hops in a stout, as a long boil takes all that aroma out (and aroma gets lost in a stout any way), and to get the required bitterness for a stout, you really need more of it (as it is lower in AA%). I was too scared to properly bitter anything when I went from Kit and kilo to extract plus grains. But now I am more confident with it (and have programs to calculate bitterness), I'm happy to bitter up. But the choc malt (and more so the roasted dark malt) adds its own bitterness before hops even come into it.

I love noble hops, but in beers that need it (like lagers, pale ales, amber ales, belgians).
 
I didn't boil, just steeped.

Technically from an AG point of view, this isn't correct. But the majority of the fermentable sugars were in the kit (or unhopped extract), so no issue.

Ideally you'd be boiling the resulting liquor from your grain steep to reduce the risk of infection.
 
Ideally you'd be boiling the resulting liquor from your grain steep to reduce the risk of infection.

I sort of boiled it, by leaving the heat on.

Like I said, not the technically correct thing to do, I now know, but it is what I did, so I answered the questions truthfully. :)

If I knew what I did now, I'd 1. Done AG anyway, as BIAB is dead-easy and 2. if I did do K&K, I'd steep, sparge and boil.

I never did get an infection with the darker beers. I always found that the margin for error on darker beers is far higher than lighter beers. Probably because the roasted grains would hide any off-flavours? Don't know.

Not saying this is "go out and do it" advice, more "this is what I did for years and got consistent results I was happy with".

My actual advice would be - go and find Nick_JD's guide to all grain brewing for less than 30 bucks - your brewing will come ahead in leaps and bounds if you do. If making a dark ale, use mostly pale grains and some roasted/choc malt to bring the colour up. Again, margin for error is pretty good on dark beers.
 

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