This kit includes your choice of four recipesa brown ale, a wheat beer, an IPA, and an Irish red aleand Northern Brewer offers many more options la carte. Most notably, theres no kettle, and the included spoon is plastic rather than stainless steel. Overall, its not a lot of work. Reusing bottles (rather than buying new ones for every batch) or switching to kegging reduces glass and plastic consumption, as well. We independently review everything we recommend. The fermenter has a wide mouth, which makes it easy to clean, and bottles are included (albeit PET plastic quart-size bottles with screw-on caps). If theres too much sugar remaining in solution when you bottle, the yeast will keep working, producing CO2, which produces pressure, which can eventually cause your bottles to turn into grenades, complete with glass shrapnel. At the homebrewing level, the most traditional setup is a three-vessel system featuring a mash tun (typically a converted 5- or 10-gallon cooler) and two large kettles (which serve as a hot liquor tank and a boil kettle). Were happy to see these items included but not too bothered if theyre not. Crucially, it comes with a 5-gallon stainless steel kettle, a 21-inch stainless steel stirring spoon, and a hydrometerthree essential tools that other kits sometimes lack. But it lacks many of the extras the 2-gallon version and our 1-gallon pick come with, like an airlock, bottling wand, and spoon. The same goes for the tubing, siphon, bottle filler, kettle, and anything else that comes into contact with the wort/beer after its been boiled. The Williams Bottling Home Brewery from Williams Brewing isnt a bad kit, but it comes up short in several areas considering it costs just as much as our top pick. We followed the instructions to the letter and used only the tools and utensils that were provided, and we did the same with our 1-gallon pick. The kit recommends you gently flow the beer directly from the fermenters ball-lock valve into PET screw-top bottles, which is a great way to make oxidized beer. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Dont let that stop you from trying it again!. Some pricier kits (like our upgrade pick from MoreBeer) come with larger kettles that use thicker steel. However, despite its relatively high price, this kit doesnt come with a kettle or a lot of other crucial and nice-to-have items, including a hydrometer, airlock, or spoon. And it doesnt include a kettle, so its not as easy to use or as good of a value as our picks. We think MoreBeers Premium Electric kits provide more flexibility (especially when it comes to moving to all-grain brewing) and will require fewer upgrades over time. Beginner homebrewers should know that you have the rest of your life to geek out on equipment, Sarah Flora advised, adding, but the first step is to learn how to make good beer., We recommend that most first-time brewers buy a 5-gallon kit. New-school thinking eschews the use of a secondary fermenter, since unnecessary transfers are just another way to expose beer to oxidation and infection. Once everything has been cleaned, sanitized, and dried, store it someplace dry and covered until youre ready to use it again. The temperature controllers can be used to program step mashes, and some of the more advanced models can even interact directly with brewing recipe design software to automate every step of the mash, boil, and chilling process. Yeah, Im in pretty deep. That might be okay for the first use, when everything is fresh from the factory. In general, the items you get in the Brew Share Enjoy kit are similar to those youd get in competing kits, but there are more of them, and in some cases theyre designed a little better. Many brewers stick with extract for years, and its possible to make excellent beer using both dry and liquid malt extract. Additionally, with these systems, you typically mash in a stainless steel grain basket rather than a cloth bag. But we also checked out Amazon and Walmart just to make sure there werent any hidden gems out there. If youre looking to brew beer for the first time, but you arent ready to invest in a fully customized home brewery, the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy Homebrew Starter Kit is a great place to start. Although the quality of the beer produced in any kit depends on a huge number of variables (most of which are in the brewers hands), this kit gives you a great chance at success. But there are pros to going small, too. The Midwest Supplies Simply Beer 1 Gallon Beer Making Kit has a nice wide-mouth plastic fermenter (we actually prefer it to the glass one that comes with our 1-gallon pick). Printed step-by-step instructions are also included in the box, and theyre unique to the recipe kit you choose. As we mentioned above, the kettle that comes with the Brew Share Enjoy kit is nice to have, but its one item you may want to upgrade almost right away. I started with a standard partial mash 5-gallon homebrewing kita former version of our top pick from Northern Brewer, actually. However, the kit does come with priming sugar (which you add at bottling to carbonate your beer), bottle caps, a standard wing-style bottle capper, and even a bottle brush to ensure that your bottles are clean and sanitary before you fill them. (That low effort-to-reward ratio is one reason we recommend going for a 5-gallon kit whenever possible.) Another way to make your brewing more sustainable is to feed your spent grain to livestock or wildlife, or compost it for your garden. The other risk comes from bottle bombs, which occur when you bottle beer before the yeast is done fermenting. If youre intimidated by the volume of a 5-gallon kit, you dont have a lot of space to make your own beer, or you simply want to experiment with smaller batches, consider a 1-gallon kit. Finally, we looked at the recipe kits themselves, focusing on the freshness of the ingredients, but we ultimately didnt give recipe design too much weight. The Brewers Best Beer Brewing Equipment Kit can often be found on sale, but its not as complete as our picks, so youll have to buy more items separately. One-gallon kits like this one typically dont come with a lot of the stuff you get in our 5-gallon picks. It also costs more than our 1-gallon pick and doesnt come with a recipe kit, which will cost you another $20 or so. The included tools are far more important, because although youll make the included recipe only once, youll be using the equipment over and over. Old-school kits required you to siphon beer from the fermenter into a bottling bucket after fermentation was complete, but the Brew Share Enjoy kit features a more-modern siphonless design. The Wirecutter kitchen team knows how to throw a party, and weve spent hundreds of hours finding the best gear for any occasion, even game day. Beer quality is just way too subjectiveand there are too many variables involved in the brewing processto definitively claim one kit is going to produce a better beer than another. Cleaning also wastes a lot of water, so where possible, try to reuse water when it comes time to clean up after your brew. Since these machines rely on electric power, you can brew indoors when its cold or rainy outside, unlike with propane-powered three-vessel systems or even larger gas-powered BIAB setups. For more resources when starting out, Conn also recommends that newbies check out Charlie Papazians The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, in addition to John Palmers book. And it can be repurposed for cooking or even heating sparge water once its days as a boil kettle are through. (Scratches in plastic can harbor unwanted wild yeast and bacteria.) Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. The Northern Brewer Premium Craft Brewery In a Box offers a better kettle than any other kit weve seen (our MoreBeer upgrade pick included), and we love that the ported Big Mouth Bubbler plastic fermenter comes with a carrying harness for extra safety. It includes more of the most important tools than other kits, and it costs less. At 14 by 14 inches, this kettle is a relatively bulky piece of equipment, but it is still compact enough to use on most full-size gas or electric kitchen ranges (note that it doesnt work with induction). But supporting local homebrew stores is also important for the sustainability of the hobby itself. The fermentation buckets lid lacks a gasket, so its not airtight, either. Most of these items are things youd pick up sooner or later as you progress in the hobby, and getting them up-front as a bundle could save you a significant amount of money (and frustration). Schott told us that the one tip he gives to every new brewer is to brew at least three times before giving up. Northern Brewers Brew Share Enjoy Homebrew Starter Kit has everything you need to begin brewing, including a 5-gallon kettle (essentially a large stock pot) and a 21-inch stirring spoontwo items most other kits in this price category dont include. You can also control the mash temperature, length, and thickness (ratio of grain to water), all of which are levers you can pull to influence your beers sweetness and mouthfeel. With the addition of a few items, however, the Brew Share Enjoy kit can also be used for all-grain brewing, should you decide to go that route in the future. If youd prefer to do your brewing outside, you can opt to buy a dedicated propane burner (or repurpose one you already own). But we think theyre too limited to be worth it, even at their low price. Compared with all-grain brewing, extract brewing is a simple process, so its a great way to start. If youre interested in all-grain brewing, the good news is that you can add such a bag to any of the extract kits we recommend, generally for well under $50. Like other electric all-in-one brewers, this machine controls mash and boil temperatures using a digital control panel and can be used either indoors or out. Specifically, with all-grain you can choose the specific malted and unmalted grains that go into your beer. There are a lot of steps in brewing, which makes it easy to mess something up on ones initial batches, he said. There are many ways to brew all-grain. Finally, we made some beer. The 8-gallon kettle that comes with the Premium Home Brewing Kit is both larger and thicker than the 5-gallon kettle you get with the Brew Share Enjoy kit. We also found lots of user reviews mentioning leaks from bad seals. Like the fermenting bucket in the Brew Share Enjoy kit, the Fermonster has a spigot that allows for easy transfers to the bottling bucket. It also has a second port for a dedicated thermometer (not included), which would be useful for monitoring mash and chilling temperatures. The same tubing is then attached to the spigot on the bottling bucket and paired with the spring-tip bottle filler to bottle the beer. We also dont love that the fermenter is made of glass, but its much less of a liability at this scale than in a 5-gallon kit. My garage currently contains more than 300 pounds of malt, and my freezer holds over 30 pounds of hops. For one thing, this kit doesnt come with a kettle or a recipe; you can get a kettle and spoon as a $30 upgrade, and a typical 5-gallon extract kit from MoreBeer will cost you about another $30. With an immersion chiller, you can circulate cold ground water through the wort instead, chilling more efficiently (and avoiding having to buy ice every time you brew). Several user reviews also mention the plastic fermenter arriving broken. (If you brew a lot, a FastRack bottle-drying rack is a nice, optional upgrade for used bottle storage.) Heres the (relatively) simple kit that one obsessive brewer has developed over four years of trial and error. Just bear in mind that youll get only about eight to 10 bottles of beer out of each 1-gallon batch. Denny Conn, co-author of Simple Homebrewing and Experimental Homebrewing, interview, February 2022, Sarah Flora, homebrewing YouTuber and host of the Brewing After Hours podcast, interview, February 2022, Marshall Schott, creator of homebrewing science site Brlosophy and host of the Brlosophy podcast, interview, February 2022, John Palmer, author of How to Brew, interview, Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association, interview, Ben Holmes, co-founder of Aeronaut Brewing Co., interview, Mike Smith, brewery director at Aeronaut Brewing Co., interview. Heres why we love it. Denny Conn agreed that the batch-size question ultimately depends on your circumstances, saying, Small batches are practical and popular now, so you need to examine your situation and see what works best for you., If youve never considered making beer before, you might be wondering what youre in for. Since it takes as much time and effort to brew a 1-gallon batch as a 5-gallon batch, we think its worth having a larger yield to show for your work. The Fermonster fermenter you get with this kit is a small but notable upgrade over the bucket that comes with the Brew Share Enjoy kit. They also give you the option of picking up ingredientslike a packet of yeast or a couple ounces of specialty maltat the last minute, which can make or break a brew day. And if youd prefer to be safe rather than sorry, a good hydrometer will cost you only an extra $15 or so. Finally, the company has a no-questions-asked replacement policy should anything go wrong, or if youre dissatisfied with the quality of the ingredients or equipment you receive. (If this isnt your first brew, feel free to skip ahead.). All of the recipes you can get with the Brew Share Enjoy kit are extract kits, meaning they come with liquid malt extract (and steeping grains) rather than requiring you to mash grain to extract the sugar. Use it to water your lawn, garden, or houseplants, or to top up your pets water bowls. Judging a kit for the quality of the beer it produces is sort of like judging a gaming console for the quality of the game you bought. And although it includes an autosiphon and a bottling wand, theres no bottling bucket. Although this one doesnt come with everything wed like in our ideal kit (most notably, its missing a hydrometer for gravity readings), on the whole this kit makes the brewing process more foolproof than any other 1-gallon option. Yet almost all of the items the kits include can also be used to make all-grain beer (with a few relatively inexpensive add-ons), especially if you opt to go all-grain with the brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) method (more on this in the Next steps section). And because the fermenter is clear, you can watch fermentation happening, which is really cool (just be sure to keep it out of direct UV light). That means you have to bottle directly from the autosiphon, which is one of the most annoying ways to do it. To be clearand this may seem counterintuitive to somewe did not judge these kits based on the quality of the beer we were able to brew. Brewing beer takes a lot of water, but there are steps you can take to mitigate your water consumption, especially while chilling your beer after the boil. And there are dozens more at Northern Brewer and other homebrew shops that you can purchase separately. But if you dont want to break the bank, this is a fine kettle to start your brewing journey with. Like several other cheap kits, this one is not siphonless, and it doesnt include a kettle, spoon, or recipe kit. Luckily, theres an easy way to avoid this: Get a kit with a hydrometer, which can tell you when the gravity (sugar concentration) of the beer has stopped changing. Just one example: The fermentation and bottling buckets you get are made of the same food-safe HDPE material as those in other kits, but the ones in this kit are translucent rather than opaque, so you can more easily determine the volume of beer inside. Ben Keough is an editor covering powering, home office, and hobbies at Wirecutter. The Brewers Best 1 Gallon Brewing Starter Kit comes with some nice extras you dont often see in small kits, like a hydrometer and a bottle of sanitizer. If the kit youve purchased doesnt come with sanitizer (many come only with cleanser, which isnt the same thing), buy some. This is not unusual among homebrewing kits, and you can either buy bottles from Northern Brewer (and other sites) or collect and reuse your favorite craft beer bottles. It includes most of the essential tools, providing a solid foundation you can build on as you progress in the hobby. Many kits come with other items that are helpful but not essential, especially for extract brewingstuff like a long metal spoon, a bottle brush, or a wort chiller.

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