Better Beer from Kits

by Scott Morgan

Introduction

Kit’s, where would many of us be without them??

Contrary to some snobby opinions, good beers can be made from kit beers. In fact many brewpubs make their beers form the sam malt extract that is used in the kits. But for the best results, kit beers need help.

Some kit vendors in beer world would like people to think good beer can only be made with a can and a kilo of sugar. This protects their business and revenue.

I hope some if not all these tips will bring about better beer with kits.

What are kits?

All kits contain a thick goo made from malt extract and Isomerized hop extract. The malt extract is prepared by quickly mashing barley to produce a wort that is vacuum evaporated to produce a thick syrup. The isomerized hop extract has very little hop flavour or aroma and approximately 3-4 mils per kit is added to deliver bitterness only. Some retailers may sell this separately.

Doesn't sound very promising for the production of great beer ?

There are a number of brands of kits available in a number of styles, however they bear as much similarity to the original beer as McDonalds do to real hamburgers. Kits are the foundation of most home brew shops. They are also available from health food shops, supermarkets, bait shops (yes Anna Bay just north of Newcastle has a shop that sells both). However like all perishible foods you need to be concerned about the freshness and quality of products brought from these sorts of places.

Good quality kits?

• Boiling your Wort
• Replacing malt for sugar / dextrose
• Cotrolling fermentation temps
• Colour malt additions
• Hop additions
• Yeast Selection
• Good Sanitation

Give it a boil

Great beers are made from a wort which is boiled for at least an hour with hops. Kits are made from malt extract which has been produced by low temperature vacuum evaporation. Can you see the difference ?

If you need further evidence, do this quick experiment next time you make up a kit beer. Leave a few tablespoons of extract in the bottom of the tin, and pour in a few cups of boiling water. Give it a good stir to dissolve as much as possible and then carefully (use oven mits so that you don't burn yourself) pour it into a saucepan. Boil it for about 10 minutes and then allow it to cool.

You will see a dirty white scum form during boiling, along with brown flakes floating within the liquid (hot break). These come from proteins and parts of the barley plant from which the malt extract was made. (Oh, and by the way, congradulations on just preparing some malt extract for use as a yeast starter!)

I don't know about you, but this scum is not the sort of thing that I want in my beer.

To give your beer a cleaner taste, rather than dissolving the kit with hot water and pouring into your fermenter, add it to a large saucepan or stock pot and while stiring carefully, boil it for 10-15 minutes. Cover and allow to cool for 15-30 minutes.

One drawback with this method is that what little hop aroma is present in the kit will be driven off, so you may like to throw in some aroma hops just as you turn off the heat.

When it has settled out, carefully pour the wort off the hot break and hops into your fermenter. Don't worry if any of the gunk makes it into your fermenter as it won't do any harm.

Replacing Sugar

One of the biggest and easiest jumps in quality that can be made is replacing sugar or dextrose recommended by vendors with liquid or dried malt. Without the facility to brew all grain, I did this for years and made good beer. Using light, amber, dark and wheat malts rather the kilo of sugar or dextrose is marginally more expensive, $4-5 a kilo from well-priced retailers, but will have an instant affect on the body and flavour profiles of the beers you make.

Sugar or dextrose can be used, but try to keep it below the 10-20% limit. Other adjuncts such as honey, golden syrup, molasses and rice malt can also be used. For example, a change to 500 gms of honey and 500 gms of light malt is much better brewing than 1 kg of neat sugar.

There is lots of room for experimentation with using other adjuncts. These ingredients can be found between the beer making retailer, health food store and supermarket.

Consistent Fermentation Temps

A good temperature for fermenting beer is one that is

• constant and
• within the range of the yeast.

Brewing at ambient temperatures means that the beer is subject to rises and falls of the day’s temperatures. Yeast, like all living things, has trouble adapting to these conditions. Obviously the extremes of summer and winter may not be the best brewing times.

Keeping the fermenting wort at a constant temperature is the ideal, but not always achievable. There are various ways you can try to do this. I brew in a fridge long past working and rotate frozen coke bottles from the house freezer. This helps dramatically in summer. I have also brewed in my laundry, which was out of direct sunlight and maintained a temperature within a few degrees between evening and day. Similarly my father-in-law brewed under his house where temperatures alter rarely. Wrapping the fermenter in a t-shirt and water bath is another method.

Trying your best is the best you can do. As well trying to avoid large rises and falls in temperature, high brewing temperatures past 25 c increases the production of esters Fusel Alcohols. Esters make the beer taste fruity while Fusel Alcohols are extremely toxic to the body and will give a clanger of a headache. Those brewers out there that use heating mats and immersion heaters can surely make beers that will be remembered for more than taste!

Brewing within the temperature range of the selected yeast is so important. Many vendors of kits advise brewing at temps of 20-26 degrees with the use heating pads, immersion heaters and the like to keep these temperatures if necessary. But these are not appropriate for all yeasts and can force the yeast out of the preferred comfort zone. Letting yeast do the work naturally rather than the brewer going to extreme lengths is the best way. Use Ale yeasts in warmer temperatures and lager yeasts in lower temperatures. Perhaps the yeast suggested by these vendors is more than happy at higher temperatures, but the flavour profile and ester production is not acceptable for all styles of beers.

Know your Yeast

When buying a kit beer take the top off and look at the yeast. Look at the type of yeast in the lager and ale kits. See if they are the same. Some vendors package the same yeast with both types of beers. This makes you wonder how 'true to style' these beers could be. The kits that I use come supplied with Safale Lager and Ale yeast. Safale yeasts produces a relatively clean flavour low in esters. Look around for other brands though and avoid the plain white un-marked variety.

Liquid yeast is the most ideal type to use. Whilst expensive you are paying for quality. With sanitary handling I get 5 batches or so by recycling the yeast. Using this method I have not had an infected batch in 2 years. ( this was due to laziness on my behalf as well ) . I have always used White Labs and will continue to do so. I have been so pleased with the results and the ease of use that I don’t see any reason to change. You can find further information on these yeasts from the following web sites :-

How To Brew by John Palmer

Lallemand (Danstar Dry Yeast)

DCL (SafAle, SafLager)

White Labs

Wyeast Labs

Brew Rat's Yeast specs.

Yeast strain recommendations by style

We also have articles on using liquid yeast and skimming yeast from your fermenter available in our library.

Colour Malt Additions

Your quality retailer should carry colour grains of various types. These grains provide an endless variety of experimentation for the brewer. Colour grains can also be made at home with the correct ingredients - see our article for further information on home roasting grain.

Colour grains do not always require mashing and are perfect for kit brewing. Into 1 litre of just boiled water add the grains and let steep for 15 minutes. Strain the liquid thru into the fermentor and wash (sparge) with another litre or so of water. Discard the grains and continue making your beer.

This hot water can then in turn be used to dissolve the main ingredients of the kit.

Basic colour grains are;

Black (Patent)  Malt
Made from highly roasted malted barley which looks like roast barley but very different in flavour profile. Good colouring malt for dark beers such as porters. Between 50- 200 gms gives good results.

Chocolate Malt
Dark brown roasted malted barley. This is not roasted to the extent of Black Malt and retains sweetness and aromatics. This imparts a nutty-type of flavour. 50 gms to 250 gms is a good start.

Crystal malt
Roasted green malt. This malt is produced by slowly drying wet germinated barley. The starch is converted to sugar in the process and cools to hard sweet crystals. These sugars do not ferment and adds a residual sweetness as well as a copper colour to the beer.

Chocolate and Crystal malts also add body to beer from the un-fermentable dextrin’s that form during their production. These malts come in different colour ratings, usually in Lovibond. Light is 10-20L, medium 40-50L and dark 90+L.

I have used 50-500gm of crystal. When you read some of the receipes on the Internet, some brewers seem never to be able to make beers without crystal and throw subtlety right out of the window.

Roasted Barley
Roast Barley is made by kiln roasting unmalted barley at high temperatures. This grain has an assertive, distinctive flavour that contributes a lot of colour. 50 – 500 gms can be used, and is the primary colouring ingredient in Stouts.

The following grains must be mashed (ie mixed with malted barley and held at 60-70 degrees for 30 - 60 minutes to convert the starch to sugar). Never add them without mashing as they will simply add starch to your beer. While this doesn't cause much problems with the flavour, you can get horribly overcarbonated beer as bacteria can use the starch for a food source, producing 'bottle bombs' in the process.

Dextrin Malts (Vienna, Cara-malts, Munich)
These malts require mashing. They add colour and body to beer. Vienna is good for adding an amber colour, Cara-malts a lesser colour and Munich a darker malty sweetness. All of these malts aid in head retention and adding body to beer.

Flaked Barley, Oats, and Rice
These grains are made by squashing the heated grain between 2 rollers. The heat gelatinises the grains, but they still need to be mashed.

Flaked barley is a great malt for adding body and head retention. 500 gms is a good amount. Again, you must use a minimash with this grain.

Oats add a silkiness but must be used in smaller amounts. The excess of Lipid Acids can stick sparges if over used. 100 gms is a good place to start, and I once used 500gm in a lovely Oatmeal stout.

Flaked Rice has the opposite affect desired from most malts. Flaked rice lessens the malt profile and colour of beer and adds fermentable sugars. Budweiser and Phil’s famous lager uses rice, and can be a great addition.

Malted Wheat

For those of you love Redback and German Weizens, then this is the stuff for you. Wheat in high amounts can produce a cloy-ey clove like flavour. Many weizens have up to 50% of the grain bill as wheat malt. For me these beers are too much, and I usually stay at 500 gms.

Hop Additions

Where would we bee without hops - we couldn't make modern beers without them. Hops give beers the bitterness and flavours that we associate with beers.

I love hops well and truly. I put them in everything. Hops come in the form of flowers, plugs (compressed flowers) and pellets. Quite heated debates can erupt between brewers on which is better, personally I don’t care. The only problems with flowers are when they can clog up the fermenter tap if not strained out.

Different hops give different flavours and different levels of bitterness (measured in Alpha Acid). The bitterness produced by using hops is measured in International Bittering Units (IBU’s). With Kit beers being pre-bittered, you are really looking for flavour. Some styles of beer may also require a certain type of hop, such as Saaz in pilsners, Cluster in English beers.  Having drunk a lot of US beers I love Cascade and Northern Brewer hops. “Noble” European hops are also great for flavour. Ask your retailer if you are not sure which hop is for which beer.

Adding 20-30 gms of hops into the wort when you add hot water to dissolve the malt is a good way to start. Hops teas are another method. Adding a quantity of hops and hot water to a coffee plunger or teapot can be used. But, do not add the hot water directly to the wort. The tea is best added at close to the fermentation temperature to retain as much aroma as possible.

Sanitation

Sanitary brewing practices and vessels are critical. One cannot emphasis how anal one has to be and how much this can pay off.

Using good sanitising solutions is the first place to start. I use bleach as it is cheap and you can use heaps without worry. Sodium Metabisulphite apart from being awful to smell, does not go the whole way to killing all bacteria. So I just stick to bleach.

Scrubbing the residues and like from your fermenter is a must. Go to all efforts to get all the left overs off the fermenter.

If using a plastic fermenter with a tap at the bottom, unscrew it after each batch and pull apart the tap if possible (soak in hot water first to soften for pulling apart.) It is amazing the amount of left over yeast and trub that can be in the tap thread. Left over for the next batch, this is a recipe for disaster.

Wash you hands and all implements used in the beer making.

Elbow grease helps. Being lazy is the only time I have had infected beers. After spending 4 hours mashing, the thought of spoiling the beer by being lazy is silly.

Just clean clean clean and all should go well.

It is my hope that this information will provide brewers with a better understanding of what makes for a better kit beer. Kits are a cheap and convienient way of starting out in the world of brewing, but they are just that - the start not the end goal.

Although I must say, that once you feel comfortable with the techniques presented in this article, you really don't need the kit anymore. You will be ready to start making your own styles by brewing from malt extract, hops and yeast - all of your own selection. Plus it will even save you money.

Sounds like a good topic for the next article.

Beer-o-Rama

Scott Morgan