Beer and brewing

We brewed each kit on a Mangrove Jack’s Traditional Series Starter home brewery. We brewed each kit exactly as described in the provided instructions.

Instructions were evaluated on how easy they were to follow and read, were they easy to keep while fermenting, and how they compared to "good practice". Ease of use was based on how simple it was to get the extract into the fermenter and then finish the brew. This included measuring hot and cold water. Beer quality was a subjective test when tasting after the suggested bottling period.

Clean clean clean

The number one thing you do when brewing is cleaning. Any small infection can grow to ruin your beer either in the fermenter or in the bottles. After cleaning and rinsing with detergent you need to rinse all equipment with steriliser.

It’s a laborious process but necessary to make good beer.

All the ales

There are a number of different beer styles being made in our test. APA stands for American Pale Ale, a beer made with American hops. These tend to have strong resin flavours. NZPA is a New Zealand Pale Ale, made with New Zealand hops, which aren’t as strong but still have a sharp bitterness. The draughts are basic ales.

The brews

Baylands Brewing NZPA

This large kit comes with just over 20 litres of wort (the liquid containing all the sugars from the malt and hops from the boiling stage of brewing) with Gladfield malts and NZ hops, (Nelson Sauvin, Kohatu and Cascade). The pack also comes with yeast to pitch and hop pellets to add later in the process for extra hop bitterness, giving you a lovely pineapple fruitiness in the beer. As there’s nothing much to be done when brewing, the instructions and process are simple. While it’s the most expensive ($1.77/pint) the beer is certainly worth it.
Availability: Only available from Baylands brewing online store.

Brewtec Premium Draught

This can kit comes with one tin of malt and hop extract; you’ll need to add 1kg of brewing sugar (dextrose) or another “brew helper”. To brew, you need to melt the extract inside the can, before adding it to the fermenter. This kit made the darkest coloured beer with a nice malty flavour. While not a spectacular tasting beer it was very drinkable and only $0.52 per pint.

Mangrove Jack’s Columbus APA

This kit comes with two foil packs of malt and hop extract; you’ll need to add 650g of brewing sugar (dextrose). To brew, you need to melt the extract inside the foil packs, before adding it to the fermenter. This kit comes with quite detailed instructions about various factors when brewing. The beer was a lot sweeter than we expected but still has a lot of hop bitterness, though it is the second most expensive at $1.04 per pint.

Lion Draught

This can kit comes with one tin of malt and hop extract, you’ll need to add 1kg of brewing sugar (dextrose) or another “brew helper”. To brew, you need to melt the extract inside the can, before adding it to the fermenter. We noted that this can kit was the only one that told us to remove the label instructions from the can before starting. This kit makes a beer similar to Lion Brown, which could certainly stand to be a bit maltier. While not a spectacular tasting beer it was drinkable and only $0.43 per pint, the cheapest in our test.

Cooper’s Mexican Cerveza

This can kit comes with one tin of malt and hop extract, you’ll need to add 1kg of brewing sugar (dextrose) or another brew helper. To brew, you need to melt the extract inside the can, before adding it to the fermenter. This kit makes a beer similar to Corona and tasted just as nice when lime was added to the finished product. While not an amazing tasting beer it was drinkable and only $0.45 per pint.

Blackrock American Pale Ale

This can kit comes with one tin of malt and hop extract, you’ll need to add a 1kg can of Blackrock Ultralight malt extract (or similar). To brew, you need to melt the extract inside the cans, before adding them to the fermenter. Unfortunately, there was an issue with this brew that may have been caused by an infection in the fermenter; as such, the beer was not drinkable. We have not included Beer Quality in the final overall score.

Mangrove Jack’s Traditional Pale Ale

This kit comes with a foil pack of malt and hop extract, you’ll need to add 1kg of brewing sugar (dextrose). To brew, you need to melt the extract inside the foil pack, before adding it to the fermenter. This kit comes with quite hard to read instructions due to small print and the use of red text on a green background. The beer was a lot sweeter than we expected but still had some hop bitterness, still only $0.57 per pint.

But is it cheaper?

As you can see by our price per pint calculations, even the most expensive brew kit makes some very cheap beer. The Baylands NZPA wort kit costs $75 for the pack and (excluding the cost of bottles and the fermenter) works out to roughly $1.80 per pint. The kit makes a nice hoppy pale ale, that wouldn’t win awards but was pub quality. A fair equivalent might be Mac’s Three Wolves Pale Ale that retails for roughly $14 for a 6-pack or just over $2/bottle. We measured price per pint using American pints (~473mls), so using this measure, the Mac’s would be roughly $3.35 per pint.

At the cheaper end, the Brewtec Draught kit made a simple slightly darker NZ draught ale for $0.52 per pint. A case of 18x330ml cans of Double Brown retails for $25, or roughly $1.99 per pint. The home brew is practically a quarter of the price!

Most brew kits told us to sprinkle the yeast over the brew (called “pitching”). While simple, this may not give the dried yeast the best shot at life in your beer. Instead, mix the yeast slowly into a small amount of warm (roughly 20°C) water or even a sample of your brew, for a few minutes just to get the culture up and running. Then pour this mixture into your brew.

Temperature is incredibly important to yeast and hence temperature control while brewing is essential. If the brew is too cold, fermentation will be slower. Too warm and the yeast may start to create unwanted chemicals and flavours. Most of the kits we tried required you to add hot and cold water so you needed to be careful of the temperature when pitching the provided yeast.

Adding finings to your beer roughly two days before you bottle should give nice clear amber beer. We used the Mangrove Jack’s finings provided in the kits as well as Isinglass finings. Of the two, the Mangrove Jack’s finings worked much better.

If you are dry hopping your beer (adding hops during fermentation) then we recommend using a permeable bag as the dried hops will disintegrate into your brew and need to be removed later. One of these bags is supplied with the Mangrove Jack’s Columbus APA.

Many home brewers use a “bottling bucket” instead of bottling directly from the fermenter. Essentially this is a container the same size as your fermenter that you siphon your brew into before bottling. This step will cut down the amount of sediment in your beer and allows you to mix in a priming solution instead of adding priming sugar to each bottle.