And it can be repurposed for cooking or even heating sparge water once its days as a boil kettle are through. Not only does it reduce the number of steps involved in brewing, potentially shortening your brew day, but it also simplifies recipe-building in several other ways. You can contact them via text or email, and theres also a knowledge base (essentially a collection of blog posts) on Northern Brewers website that provides an in-depth look at most aspects of brewing. Bags from Wilserbrewer and The Brew Bag are popular options among BIAB devotees. 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. Brooklyn Brew Shop sells a wide variety of 1-gallon kits, both through its own site and via retailers like Amazon.com. Both kits are siphonless. Like the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit we recommend, this kit comes with Northern Brewers excellent customer service via text message and email, seven days a week. Most of the kits we recommend are designed for making beer using malt extract. And theyre all-grain rather than extract, which teaches new brewers some important skills. 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). 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). Though the effort involved is still considerable, a 1-gallon kit makes the process less intense. 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. And there are hundreds to choose from, each contributing its own distinct flavor, aroma, and color to the finished product. 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. So its a good entry point for beginners. Second, its less oxygen-permeable, which means it may protect better against spoilage in beers that spend longer in the fermenter before being bottled. 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. This kit comes with a big, heavy-duty stainless kettle (which you wont have to replace as soon as you would the ones from cheaper kits), plus a copper immersion chiller and a better fermenter. Its worth repeating: In brewing, sanitation is everything. If youre relatively certain youre going to stick with homebrewing for years to come, the MoreBeer Premium Home Brewing Kit may be a better initial investment than the Brew Share Enjoy. 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. But you do get almost all the essentials you need to make a (small) batch of beer with minimal stress, including an airlock, a bottling wand and tubing, a bottle capper, bottle caps, oxygen-based cleanser, and even some personalizable beer bottle labels. But if you want to know more, John Palmers How to Brew is a great, free introduction. (A less-expensive, extract-focused version of the kit without the DigiMash upgrade is also available.). But we also checked out Amazon and Walmart just to make sure there werent any hidden gems out there. If you have an immersion chiller like the ones that come with several of our kits, you can build a recirculation system (video) that runs the same water through ice several times for quicker cooling. Its not pretty. Ben Keough is an editor covering powering, home office, and hobbies at Wirecutter. Whether it's finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we'll help you get it right (the first time). The most glaring omission in this kit is a no-rinse sanitizer, like Star San. Like several other cheap kits, this one is not siphonless, and it doesnt include a kettle, spoon, or recipe kit. Ive got a four-tap keezer (a chest freezer kegerator) thats always full. However, there are some compelling reasons to move to all-grain. It even offers Star San sanitizer, whereas the Brew Share Enjoy doesnt. When we first reviewed homebrewing kits, in 2017, our testing process was simple. Some pricier kits (like our upgrade pick from MoreBeer) come with larger kettles that use thicker steel. We didnt test and dont recommend any of these machines for beginners (mostly due to their high cost). The Premium Home Brewing Kit comes with your choice of four extract-based recipe kits, including a classic American pale ale, a double IPA inspired by the legendary Pliny the Elder, a hazy IPA, and an amber ale. If the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit is out of stock or costs more when youre ready to buy: Give the MoreBeer Deluxe Home Brewing Kit a look. And at any given time, I have at least three more beers fermenting, plus long-term barrel projects and mixed-culture fermentations. 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. Thats fine for brand-new equipment, but once youve brewed with your gear, youre going to want to start sanitizing in addition to cleaning. In 2022, we once again surveyed the homebrewing kits available from the most popular online brew shops, as well as large internet retailers like Amazon and Walmart. The Northern Brewer Electric Brew Share Enjoy includes a lot of useful items, including a copper immersion chiller and ported wide-mouth plastic fermenters, but its 4.4-gallon Gigawort electric kettle would limit homebrewers to smaller extract batches, or require them to make very concentrated wort and top up for larger batches. Though not quite as advanced as other electric systems on the marketlike the BrewZilla 35L (made by the same manufacturer) or Grainfather G30this kit is the only option we found that bundles an electric brewing machine with all the essentials needed to get started from scratch. The concept is broadly similar to BIAB in that you mash the grains in the same vessel where you boil; the main difference is that you dont need to monitor mash temperature as closely, since the machine does it for you. (That low effort-to-reward ratio is one reason we recommend going for a 5-gallon kit whenever possible.) And Northern Brewer provides excellent support. Pass. 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. Subscribe now for unlimited access. After four years testing printers, he has confirmed that they all suck, but some suck less than others. If you use an immersion chiller, you can use the hot water that comes out of the outlet to clean your spoon and kettle, or you can wash your gear in rainwater collected in a barrel. Plus, you get a copper immersion chiller, a Star San sanitizer, and everything else our top pick includes. When I recommend gear to folks interested in getting into brewing, it almost always includes a kettle and quality fabric filter.. This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston. We also looked at price, online user reviews, and availability. Perhaps more importantly, though, this kettle has a ball valve for easy transfers, which means youll be less likely to hurt yourself or spill beer while trying to pour wort into your fermenter. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Yet despite beer brewings simplicity and rewards, getting started can seem daunting. I have to imagine those who live in smaller spaces or people who like experimenting with different recipes would appreciate it, he said. For example, you dont get a kettle, since you almost certainly have something in your kitchen already thats large enough to handle the necessary boil volume (like an 8-quart stock pot or a 6-quart Dutch oven). But supporting local homebrew stores is also important for the sustainability of the hobby itself. 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. For people who are pretty certain they want to dive headfirst into brewing beer, the MoreBeer Premium Home Brewing Kit provides a more durable, flexible, and complete starting point than the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit, albeit at a significantly higher price. 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. And as John Palmer told us, A good fermentation of a bad recipe is going to make a better beer than a bad fermentation of a great recipe.. For example, old-school brewing rules mandated that every beer should be transferred to a new fermenter for a secondary fermentation after the main (aka primary) fermentation was finished. But eventually I progressed to using an electric all-in-one system. Whole malt also tends to be fresher than extract, which can make a substantial difference in the finished beers taste. In my experience, MoreBeer sometimes takes a bit longer to respond to emails than Northern Brewer, but its not a huge difference. 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. There are a lot of steps in brewing, which makes it easy to mess something up on ones initial batches, he said. Although lots of popular styles use other stuff, including lactose, spices, and other flavorings, the basics are all thats needed to brew some of the best beer in the world (just ask the Germans). But a kit should also set you up for success in your brewing journey, and that means its makers need to be aware of the latest industry trends, from safety improvements to ways to streamline the brewing process. Use it to water your lawn, garden, or houseplants, or to top up your pets water bowls. Any kit that doesnt have valves on both the fermenter and bottling bucket isnt worth it, Flora told us, adding (with just a touch of hyperbole), the valve costs all of 10 cents and will save you the stress of attempting to pour or siphon your beer.. There are always new techniques to learn, new recipes to try, and new bits of gear to acquire. These stores serve as hubs for a citys homebrewing community and provide expert advice that can be trickier to find online. But there are pros to going small, too. 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. 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. With all that said, if you decide youd rather start with an extract-based kit like those we recommend, dont worry: Upgrading to an electric all-in-one (or some other all-grain setup) down the line wont render your initial investment worthless. These machines feature a stainless steel kettle and integrated ultra low watt density (ULWD) heating elements paired with a digital temperature controller. That might be okay for the first use, when everything is fresh from the factory. Our top pick doesnt include one, so its instructions recommend you fill a sink with ice water, plop the kettle inside, and stir your wort in the kettle to chill it.