How to Make Your Own Beer
How to Make Your Own Beer is a question asked often. Home beer brewing has become a fast growing hobby and this doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. When I started researching home brewery kits some of the most helpful videos I came across were the Coopers Beer Brewing Kit videos (they include a DVD of these in their beer kit). These beer brewing instructional videos are broke down into four simple to follow videos. They demonstrate using the coopers kit (obviously) but the basic instruction is the same for any extract beer kit. You’ll learn all the essential basics around making beer at home.
How to Make Your Own Beer – Video #1
- Cleaning and Sanitizing
- Preparing Your Malt Extract
- Mixing your Beer Ingredients
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How to Make Your Own Beer – Video #2
1. Checking Temperature
2. Adding your brewing yeast
3. Filling and installing your airlock
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How to Make Your Own Beer – Video #3
1. Preparing your beer bottles
2. Adding carbonation drops
3. Bottling your beer
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How to Make Your Own Beer – Video #4
1. Enjoying your homemade beer!
Homemade Beer Kits
Homemade beer kits could be called the easy bake oven of beer kits! Homemade beer kits are designed to provide you with everything you need to start making good beer at home quickly. You have several choices of kits when it comes to making beer from a kit. What I looked for in a beer brewing kit, I looked for a kit that would grow with me and my hobby. I wanted to make sure that whatever homemade beer kit I picked, it would be able to accommodate other beer ingredient kits. What this means it that I didn’t want to get a beer kit that made me lock into there particular beer ingredient kits. The coopers beer brewing kit is designed to make the most popular brew size of 5 gallons.
If you do any amount of searching for beer ingredient kits you’ll quickly see that 95% of these are going to make a 5 gallon batch of beer. A MR Beer kit or a beer machine will only make a 2 or 2.5 gallon batch. You’ll find out that when you go through the motions of brewing a batch of beer you want to be able to enjoy a full 5 gallons of beer, not 2. Five gallons of beer is about the equivalent to about 54 twelve ounce beers or about 2.5 cases of beer. This is a good amount to enjoy yourself and to give some homemade beer to your friends and family.
If you’re considering a homemade beer kit for yourself or as a gift, do yourself a favor and take a good look at the Coopers Beer Brewing kit. In my brewing opinion it’s the best brewing kit available.
Home Brewery Kits
Home Brewery Kits are the fastest and easiest way to make beer at home. Home Brewery Kits like Coopers beer kits make you into a home beer brewer within hours of receiving your beer kit in the mail. Home beer kits include everything you need to make your own beer at home. If you are wondering about all the hardware and what ingredients you need to make beer, look no further. A Home Brewery Kit takes all the guess work out of making your first batch of home brew. Here is a list of everything included in a Coopers home beer brewing kit:
- 1 Plastic 30 liter fermenter with lid (and o ring),
makes 23 liters (6 Gallons) - 1 Hydrometer
- 1 Sediment Reducer
- 1 Plastic Spoon
- 1 “Little Bottler” tube and bottling valve
- 1 Tap
- 1 Airlock
- 1 Airlock grommet
- 1 Thermometer
- 30 740ml PET bottles and caps
- 1 Instruction booklet
- 1 Instructional DVD
- 1 Cooper’s Lager Beer Kit Package – which includes:
- 1 1.7kg Coopers Lager Beer Kit Concentrate with yeast
- 1 1 kg Coopers Brewing Sugar
- 1 Bag of Carbonation drops
This home brewing kit was what I decided to buy about 3 years ago. I know I didn’t want a small Mr Beer kit. I wanted a beer brewing kit that would grow with me and would allow me to get more sophisticated with my beer recipes. The coopers beer kit allows you to brew more advance beer recipes such as the next level of beer ingredient kits like a “partial mash” kit. Unfortunately most beer brewing kits get lumped together and get talked down because they tend to include all brands of beer kits with the smaller kits of lesser quality like the “Mr Beer” kit. Don’t make any assumptions with the coopers beer kit. Take a look at the video and judge for yourself. The Coopers Home Brewery Kits are a great value.
Coopers Beer Kits
If you are curious about the Coopers Beer Kits you’ve arrived at the right place! A Coopers Beer Kit will cost $99 and if you’re wondering if these kits are worth it, read on..
When I decided I wanted to start making beer at home I did like most people do and I Googled home brewery 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. Since I knew little more about home brewing than I knew I liked beer and I wanted to give brewing beer at home a try. I knew practically nothing about sanitation methods, how my beer was going to carbonate in the bottle, or what wort was, or what I needed to know.
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 in their kits so that means you’d have to either buy buy with resealable glass bottles, 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 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 bottle your beer.
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 even making homemade wine and I’m using my Coopers beer brewing kit for the, BTW. I was pretty happy with my 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!