CiderTropica
New Member
Whenever I see a kit that demands adding sugar or one of their proprietary "beer kit enhancers" (which costs almost the same as the kit itself), the first thing I think is: No. Let's brew this short and add some dried malt extract if we need to bring up the ABV. Adding sugar is the primary culprit in "homebrew twang", and stopping this has eliminated that off-flavour from all my brews.
Coopers Half Ruby Devil's Porter is supposed to be a 23-litre (40-pint) kit, but that's only if you include a ton of sugar. Instead, I made it up to 10 litres using hard Coventry tap water, which is ideal for stouts and porters (which apparently were originally made with hard London water).
The SG was just under my target of 1.060, so I added 200g light DME to bring it up. After 9 days, the SG was stable at 1.012, indicating around 6.3% ABV.
I bottled the beer and placed the 20 or so bottles in a box on two heat pads, with a teaspoon and a half of white table sugar in each for carbonation. This turned out to be way too much priming sugar; I had taken this estimate from when I made a Belgian dark whose instructions demanded 7g of sugar per 500ml. The resultant beer had a huge head and I will definitely use less priming sugar next time.
I always bottle beer with three or four smaller 330ml bottles for testing purposes. My brews are usually fully carbonated within three days. However, the first test bottle was flat as a pancake. Another test bottle a few days later yielded a similar result. It ended up taking eight days to carbonate which, reading around, is normal for stouts/porters. It looked like this:
Adding around 0.5% ABV to account for the priming sugar, at 6.8% ABV this brew is more of a stout than a porter.
I am blown away by how good this beer tastes. Not only is it the best homebrew I've ever made, it's also possibly the best beer I have ever tasted. The mouth-feel is gorgeous and it just slips down. Based on taste alone, I would never have guessed it is around 6.8% ABV. However, the alcoholic effects speak for themselves.
I am so impressed with this beer that I have ordered two kits in order to make a single 20-litre batch.
While cheaper kits like Coopers are very mean in how much malt extract is actually in the tin, if you brew it very short to your desired ABV you can still make a truly excellent beer.
Coopers Half Ruby Devil's Porter is supposed to be a 23-litre (40-pint) kit, but that's only if you include a ton of sugar. Instead, I made it up to 10 litres using hard Coventry tap water, which is ideal for stouts and porters (which apparently were originally made with hard London water).
The SG was just under my target of 1.060, so I added 200g light DME to bring it up. After 9 days, the SG was stable at 1.012, indicating around 6.3% ABV.
I bottled the beer and placed the 20 or so bottles in a box on two heat pads, with a teaspoon and a half of white table sugar in each for carbonation. This turned out to be way too much priming sugar; I had taken this estimate from when I made a Belgian dark whose instructions demanded 7g of sugar per 500ml. The resultant beer had a huge head and I will definitely use less priming sugar next time.
I always bottle beer with three or four smaller 330ml bottles for testing purposes. My brews are usually fully carbonated within three days. However, the first test bottle was flat as a pancake. Another test bottle a few days later yielded a similar result. It ended up taking eight days to carbonate which, reading around, is normal for stouts/porters. It looked like this:
Adding around 0.5% ABV to account for the priming sugar, at 6.8% ABV this brew is more of a stout than a porter.
I am blown away by how good this beer tastes. Not only is it the best homebrew I've ever made, it's also possibly the best beer I have ever tasted. The mouth-feel is gorgeous and it just slips down. Based on taste alone, I would never have guessed it is around 6.8% ABV. However, the alcoholic effects speak for themselves.
I am so impressed with this beer that I have ordered two kits in order to make a single 20-litre batch.
While cheaper kits like Coopers are very mean in how much malt extract is actually in the tin, if you brew it very short to your desired ABV you can still make a truly excellent beer.
