Kit & a kilo, without the kilo?

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eoghan

eoghan

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First daft query - Is it possible to brew with a kit to a smaller volume, leaving out the additional sugars? Possible isn’t the right word, obviously this *can* be done, but is it a good idea?

Found a few videos suggesting specifically in relation to MJ raspberry weisse and Berliner sour, that these work out ok at 16L volumes without adding the extra sugar. I know it’s accepted to brew short to drive up the ABV or concentrate flavours, but in that scenario all the fermentables are added.

Does it depend on the kit? Or style? I’d see it as a way to have more variety in the stockpile by not needing to find room for 40 pints every time, but only if it works
 
It depends what ABV you're looking for, for example if you have a 1500g kit and make 16 litres your ABV will be 2.7%. If you add 1000g of dextrose you get 5%. Use the Brewers Friend recipe tool to calculate what you get with various options.
 
Good question. The taste will differ because of the amount of hops. It will be relatively more when scaling down. I have no experience with weiß or sours, but can imagine that the taste will be more... intense?
 
Cheshire Cat said:
It depends what ABV you're looking for, for example if you have a 1500g kit and make 16 litres your ABV will be 2.7%.
Click to expand...

I suppose the aim would be roughly whatever % the kit originally specified. I just checked again, and both of the MJ kits I mentioned are quite low ABV by design, and they only call for 600g dextrose. So maybe they’re more suited to the manipulation.

I’ll do some number crunching for the evening
 
Every 10% reduction in the recommended volume will increase the IBUs by 10% in the finished product. Although if you have done the kit before you will know how bitter it turns out, and will be able to adjust accordingly. Or put another way if you are reducing the volume on a kit that is already quite bitter you might not want to reduce the volume by too much.
 
eoghan said:
Is it possible to brew with a kit to a smaller volume, leaving out the additional sugars?
Click to expand...
Quite a few people say they're doing a 'Toucan' beer, which is using two beerkits together without sugar - sometimes mixing different ones. You see a lot of Aussies doing it because beer kits are mad cheap over there compared to here. Like 6 quid a kit. I'd be doing toucans or partial mashes as often as all grain if they were that price here.



I've done some kits just to 2 gallons instead of 5. Geordie kits that I got cheap. I didn't find them too bitter, even the Geordie Bitter. I liked it with the mild.

If you haven't tried it definitely think about tarting up your kits with a dry hop. It's a great starting point for upping the perceived value of a kit far beyond the baseline.
 
I did 1 can kits for many years. Some were fine, some suffered terribly from the homebrew twang.
I found that if you made them up to 4 gallons instead of five and put in half a kilo of sugar instead of 1, then they never had homebrew twang, they weren't noticeably more bitter (probably because you got more malt flavours at the same time) and were generally a far superior pint.
 
I've thought about doing this for my 10L keg, for if I just want a really quick to make and quick turn around beer. My idea was to brew 11L with a 1.5kg Wilko lager kit as the base and add a couple of hundred grams of dextrose or even sucrose to bring the abv up, and a hop tea to it pre fermentation and dry hop at day 7, keg at day 10 and be drinking by day 14.
The lager kits will be quite lightly hopped already so shouldn't be overly bitter.

Reckon it'd make an alright pale ale.
 
As an update on this, we got around to trying it with a ‘free’ Coopers Brew A kit (added to an order to get free delivery). Used the calculator mentioned above to get a roughly equivalent ABV, can’t remember exactly what the fill volume was now.

Overall it worked great, the beer is perfectly drinkable though possibly not to everyone’s taste. The only problem is that the fermentation, cleaning, prep, tidying up and bottling take basically the same time as for a full brew so the return of ~20 vs ~40 pints may not be worth it. It also significantly ups the price per pint. Planning to do the same kit again with the added fermentables to compare.

TLDR: We’d do it again for sure if building a bigger variety of stock is needed if space gets tight, but not otherwise just on the basis of yield and time.
 
I was buying some bits from the Wilko website and threw a lager kit in with it. My thought is that next time I brew a beer, I can do a kind of parti-gyle and use the 2nd runnings and the Wilko kit for my 10L keg.

I just wanted to try it out really, it's definitely not a cheap way to go about things.
 

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