United Nations of Beer

Coopers beer kits

by JJ Sylvia IV
(Home Brew Delegate, USA)

Coopers beer kits
(Amazon)

The Coopers World Famous All-In-One Microbrewery Kit is, in my opinion, the single best way to get started with homebrewed beer if you're at all nervous or intimidated by the process. In fact, it's exactly how I got started making beer myself!

Possibly the best thing about this kit is that it is a relatively inexpensive way to get everything you'll need to create your first batch of beer.

Coopers beer kits come with a plastic fermenting bucket, all the beer ingredients, a hydrometer to measure alcohol content, a thermometer for the bucket, a mixing spoon, an airlock, plastic bottles and full instructions, both written and on DVD, all for about $100.

The process couldn't be easier, either. After sanitizing everything, you pour the concentrate into the fermenting bucket and mix with water, before adding the yeast.

Once the fermentation is done, in about a week or two – you'll know for sure by using your hydrometer – you can add carbonation drops to the bottles and then poor the beer in and cap them. One to two weeks later and they'll be ready to drink!

The things that make this process so easy are the use of an all concentration no-boil mix and the carbonation drops. The carbonation drops are actually little sugar cubes that you drop straight into the bottles before adding the beer.

The alternative is boiling the sugar down to a pure liquid and then mixing it in with the entire batch of beer before bottling, but that step is eliminated with this kit.

In more advanced beer making you could use full or partial grains and other ingredients, which you would boil either on your stove or over a larger flame outside. This is normally where you'd have to worry about temperatures and length of boil and boilovers, etc.

With Coopers you don't have to worry about any of that. The process has been simplified down to basically sanitizing, mixing, waiting and then draining the beer into the bottles from the fermenting bucket. It doesn't get much easier.

Another benefit of Coopers beer kits is that the flavor of the beer actually turns out pretty good. It's not going to knock your socks off, but then again, that's probably good for a first batch anyway.

The sacrifice, however, is that you lose all control and creativity over what the beer tastes like.

It's going to be pretty standard because you're strictly using the concentrate.

For a true beginner, this is almost definitely worth the loss of creativity – producing a good beer on the first try is a great confidence builder!

In the future, you can buy additional Coopers beer kits that just have the beer ingredients, allowing you to reuse your fermenting bucket, bottles and other equipment. Each batch will produce about 30 (25-ounce) bottles of beer, which is not a bad haul at all.

I made three batches using Coopers beer kits, before deciding I was ready to spend more money on upgrading my brewing equipment and expanding my comfort zone to partial grain brewing. Highly recommended.