Its been a while since I brewed from a kit but what with the recent arrival of a baby and prior to that months of working hard I’ve not had the time to do a full mash so I figured I might aswell put a kit on anyway!

I’m making a Green man beer kit which I bought yonks back from Wilkinsons it is described as a light golden ale with citrus notes, so right up my street!

Its your standard variety cheap malt extract beer kit with two tins of malt extract and a bag of yeast (Gervin GV12 – Ale yeast), Unfortunately the dog ate the instructions but I managed to decipher the gravity readings and volume from the remains of the shredded paper.

I have made up the wort to approx 22.5 litres at 25C and am getting an OG of 1040 (bang on the recipe) I’ve put my immersion heater in, sprinkled the yeast on and will aim to drop it around SG 1025 (probably around 48 hours from now) FG should be approx 1009.

Update 14th December 2014 – Dropped wort at SG1020

Barrelled on the 18th dec at SG1010 so should be ready around the 11th of January at around 3.9%

Watch this space

I always like it when I’m surprised by a beer kit and my first impressions of this kit have really surprised me!

I was bought this kit by some good friends for my birthday in January and I’ve finally got around to making it, on first impressions its great, the instructions are clear its well packaged and it feels to be very good quality (not something I’ve seen in most beer kits), the fact that its a full extract kit and the extract comes in sachets rather than tins really is brilliant, I hate getting all that gooey goodness out of the tin and getting it all across my kitchen!

The process is no different than with any kit except the sachets really do make getting all the syrup into the barrel much easier, much much easier…

Warm the syrup and mix with boiling water, add the included dextrose, add cold water and finally add the yeast.

After 5 days add the included hop pellets into the beer and leave for another 5 days.

I will brew this as usual with the immersion heater and will drop mid-ferment!

IG 1045

Kit contents:
Malt Extract Syrup sachets
Dextrose (brewing sugar)
Brewers yeast
Hop pellets
Muslin type bag for hops
Priming sugar

The final product:

To be honest I was slightly underwhelmed by this beer, unfortunately I didn’t drop it but that shouldn’t have affected it too much it just wasn’t the flavour hit that I expected, it was a clear pleasant beer and easy to drink but not quite what I expected and I doubt I would bother with it again however the packaging etc would definitely inspire me to by another pilgrim ale kit!