Beer Brewing Kits – Coopers Beer Kits

If you are curious about home beer brewing kits you’ve arrived at the right place! A beer brewing kit is an investment and if you’re wondering how to pick one, read on..

When I decided to start making beer at home I did like most people do and I Googled beer brewing kits. When you do this you’ll most likely come across the Mr Beer kit, The Beer Machine kit, you’ll very likely come across several different versions of the Pale or bucket kits, and the Coopers Beer Brewing kit. I knew practically nothing about sanitation methods, how my beer was going to carbonate in the bottle, what wort was, or what I needed to do to get started.

After doing a fair bit of researching the brewing kits I mentioned I quickly found out some basic similarities and differences. I realized when selecting a kit you need to decide the following:

* Beer Brewing Batch Size – You basically have two choices when I comes to the amount of beer your going to brew at a time. Brewing kits come in either 2 gallon or 5 gallon batch sizes. I decided that if I’m going to go through the work of brewing, I wanted to brew 5 gallons of beer, not 2 gallons. 5 gallons is about the equivalent to 2 1/2 cases of beer. The Coopers Beer Kit is a 5 Gallon Kit.

* Beer Bottles – Unless your going to keg your homebrew, you need to get bottles to put your beer in (duh). Most kits don’t include bottles so that means you’d have to either buy beer with non-twist off caps or buy new glass bottles and purchase bottle caps and a caper. What I liked about the Coopers Beer Kit was it included resealable P.E.T. (basically food-grade plastic) bottles. I liked this because it was easy to use these bottles and it didn’t require me saving bottles, buying a caper, buying caps, etc.

* Flexibility – Just as with cooking, beer brewing has different levels of complexity. The more the complex the method you use, typically the better your beer will taste. What I found while doing my research was anything past extract brewing required equipment designed for 5 gallon batches. What this means is if you want to eventually grow into more complicated brewing methods like the “partial mash” method you have to have a 5 gallon kit. The Coopers beer brewing made sense to me because it allowed me to get into more advance methods of brewing beer.

* Brewing Instructions – I know when I started brewing at home I was full of questions and was definitely afraid of messing up my first batch of beer. Although everybody can make mistakes, I felt a lot of comfort in the fact that the Coopers beer brewing kit came with a DVD that basically “holds your hand” through the entire process from sanitizing your equipment before you start, to bottling your beer properly.

Needless to say I’ve been brewing my own beer at home for over 3 years now and have started using more complex methods and have even started making homemade wine in my Coopers beer brewing kit. I’ve been happy with my coopers kit from day one and I’ve enjoyed brewing beer and wine with it ever since.

Good Luck with your home brewing hobby. All you have to do is get started with a kit and you’ll be sharing your home brewed beers with your friends and family before you know it!