I was gifted a DIY home brewing beer kit, and it turned out great. I guess I've been raving about fermenting and brewing mead, wine, kvass, and other food and drink so much that it caught the attention of some friends. Or maybe they were just sick of me talking about it.
I have successfully brewed my first batch of beer!
[author's note: I have been away from writing for a long while. Let’s fix that. I have a dozen draft articles and three specific house articles mostly written and waiting, but I'm having a hard time finishing them. Let's try writing about something totally different and see if that helps unblock the writing.]
The Process Was Easy
The kit is a Coopers DIY kit (no affiliate link, I hate that), and it pretty much comes with everything you need - a large container to hold everything while it ferments, a long spoon, a spigot, a bunch of plastic bottles, and all of the ingredients for your first batch.
The instructions are simple: Pour everything in. Stir. You don't even need to boil it. Then you wait a few weeks for it to ferment, and bottle it. Two weeks later it is ready to drink! Takes about 5 weeks total.
In the end I had a perfectly passable brown ale. It ages nicely and tastes better every week you leave it in the bottle.
Good Things: The Kit Is Well Designed
It seems simple, but the more I use it the more I appreciate the well thought out design. The fermenter tub is tall enough to hold everything for both cleaning and fermenting. The spigot is just far enough above the bottom of the base that you can empty and bottle all of the beer without getting any of the trub (leftover yeast gunk at the bottom).
Providing you with all plastic parts instead of glass bottles is a smart move on their end - it means there no risk of exploding glass in your customers' homes no matter how badly they mess up.
With some experience you could probably DIY make your own fermentation tub with a food-safe 5 gallon bucket, and installing a spigot at the right height. But it’s nice to not have to worry about it and have it just work.
Mistakes I made with my first batch
Didn't have enough water on hand
Get your water ready in advance.
A full batch of beer uses 5 gallons or 23 litres of water. I thought I had enough, but after starting I discovered that I only had two gallons / 8 litres of water ready to use. I then stupidly stood in the kitchen for a long time putting more and more tap water through a Brita filter to make sure it was good. It was slow. In total it took 90 minutes for the slow, slow, ….. slowwwwww filter to process all of the water. It would literally have been faster for me to drive *several towns over*, buy jugs of distilled water there from a grocery store, and drive back. Next time: make sure to start with the water on hand.
For future batches I made myself a checklist of steps, easy to follow on a single page.
Didn't rehydrate the yeast.
According to How To Brew, I'm supposed to set the yeast in water and let it wake up and rehydrate for 30 minutes. I just dumped it straight in. We'll see if that makes a difference next time.
It still worked. The flavour just wasn't as good.
Changes for future batches
I want to find out if you can brew beer with plain, regular sucrose table sugar. The fancy dextrose sugar they want to sell you in the brew store is 2-4x the price of sugar from the grocery store.
Beer Math - Saving Money
Brewing your own beer at home costs about one third (1/3). So if you drink beer you can save money by making it yourself.
The healthy way to think about it: quit drinking.
The next way to think about it: you can drink beer and save 66% of your money by brewing your own.
The unhealthy way to think about it: you can drink 3x as much for the same cost.
Thinking about community building: you can afford to give away fully two thirds (2/3) of what you make to neighbours, friends, and strangers, and still break even as though you had just bought it at a store. Surely that's a good way to make friends and contacts.
I have found already that beer can make a great gift to neighbours that enjoy beer.
Beer Math Details
Brewing a beer at home with off-the-shelf kit items costs about 75¢ cents per beer. Buying a beer in the store costs $3. You would pay $6 to $8 for that beer in a restaurant, and easily $10 or more at a pub or sporting event.
Even though the DIY beer kit itself is expensive, the first batch is still cheaper per drink. Depending on where you buy the kit, it may cost $120 to $200. That's a lot of money, especially to drop on beer all at once (cue the homebrewers laughing). But that kit includes the ingredients for your first batch, and one batch will get you 60 beers. That works out to $3.33 per beer, which is *still* cheaper than a restaurant, and possibly cheaper than a store.
At 75 cents per beer I can literally brew a dozen beer for the same price of one beer in a restaurant. Talk about never wanting to buy a beer again.
Not bad for being able to pour goop into a bucket and wait a few weeks.
Your Hourly Wage
So say I’m creating $3 of value per beer, saving $2.25 each. If so that's saving $135 per batch. If it takes me 2 hours to brew and 2 hours to bottle (including cleaning) you're making $33 / hour to brew your own beer. Not terrible. The money you save from brewing one batch pays for 3 more batches. It probably took me closer to 6 hours, but it’s a lot faster once you learn.
I have certainly worked jobs that pay less. And at the end of my shift I did not have 60 beers to show for my efforts.
What I Would Like Better
Please give me a smaller number of larger-sized bottles, rather than many tiny bottles. This means fewer bottles to wash and clean!
The bottles that come with the kit are 740mL / 25oz in size. I'm probably going to save up and treat myself to $25 and buy a dozen larger, one litre / 33oz bottles, so I have fewer bottles to sanitize each batch.
They might give you small bottles because they're sized to their provided sugar tablet carbonation drops. But I’m fine measuring out some sugar and mixing it in.
What's Next
Overall - the kit and experience were great! I had a lot of fun, learned a new skill, and built something I can share and give away to friends. I also learned a lot and was able to build myself a checklist for next time.
Next I'm going to try two other different beer flavours - one light and one dark. I would love to try brewing at least one “sacred herbal beer”. And something with no hops.
I want to find out if I can use regular table sugar and still get good results. That means you can buy cheaper sugar from the grocery store instead of expensive brew store dextrose, which lowers the cost and effort per batch.
Good luck with your experimental, learning, and producing projects!