36 Pint (4.5 Gallon) Homebrew Beer Making Starter Kit - St Peters Golden Ale, Home Brew Microbrewery

Looks good with all the bits in; Good customer service especially when Amazon left it behind something and did not card it to say it had arrived.

As title says, easy to use and produces a decent tasting home brew

Everything required to brew an excellent ale is here for under £50, so it is ideal for the novice brewer. My wife bought me this for my birthday in late November, and by Christmas we were drinking a very decent beer, which had had a week or so to cask condition. It does state in the description that you will need to provide your own vessels for secondary fermentation, and to be honest, I didn't want the faff of syphoning my brew into a dozen or so individually sterilised bottles, so I took the plunge and also bought a 5 gallon pressure barrel, with a tap and CO2 injector from Bigger Jugs. This was a good move in my opinion, but it doubles the price of your starter kit. Additionally some Brewers sugar comes in handy ( to give your beer a decent head ) but this is by no means essential. So, what do you get for your £50? All the items in the kit are of a high enough quality, but it's the St Peter's Brewery Golden Ale kit that accounts for almost half the cost; it's a rather hoppy but very drinkable ale that lingers on the palate with a fresh aftertaste, and brews practically by itself. All you need to do is give the combined ingredients a sterile container, a warm, dark place and time enough for it to ferment in peace. I chose an empty airing cupboard, which may have on occasion become over-warm, and to make matters worse I hadn't fixed the lid down enough to be airtight so I got no bubbling through the airlock, but the fermentation went ahead, and after 2 weeks ( the instructions claim ready after only 1 week, but my barrel hadn't arrived! ) I checked the gravity with the hydrometer and I was ready to syphon my first home brew. This is made easy by the equipment provided, but a tip I benefited from when coming to fill a bottle or barrel is to trim 12" off the plastic tube, and attach it to the tap, so minimising any agitation of your beer when it transfers into the secondary fermentation vessel. There's adequate sterilising agent for more than two brew kits and basic instructions are provided, but I would really recommend doing a bit of Internet research on home brewing forums to get an idea of what's involved and the order things need to happen in. Another tip is to really agitate the mash using the 18" spoon provided before adding the yeast and closing down the lid; this gives the yeast plenty of oxygen to go about the business of converting malt sugars into alcohol, and also avoid the temptation to peek inside every couple of hours, as you don't want to contaminate your primary fermentation with nasty spores and alien germs. All in all, I am more than happy with my kit, and the experience of home brewing with it. As you progress you may want to upgrade the manual syphon tube to a more sophisticated one, or splash out on a conical fermentation bin, but you can crack on with making beer straight away with this. It does exactly what it promises and rewards you with 36 pints of delicious ale.

4.5%

on my 3 batch of brew, very good bit of kit for the first time home brewer...many thanks

arrived very quickly with all you need to start home brewing, Son very happy