Beer and Brewer Magazine

If you want to make the best beer possible, you need the freshest ingredients. So don't grab that supermarket can - Gerard Meares says, get yourself a wort kit.

When it comes to producing great beers, fresh wort kits are near unbeatable. By far the easiest way for novice and expert homebrewers to brew, due to their no-mess, no-fuss methods, they produce great neck nectar, which is free of additives and preservatives.

Wort is the liquid sugar collected after being drained off from the mash. From there, it gets tipped straight from the lauter tun into the boiler. Many homebrewers use large cooking pots on the stove; others employ old brewery kegs cut in half and heated on gas burners. Then there's the Bruheat-style immersion heater - a vessel big enough to hold the entire wort, boil it for hours and transfer the cooled wort to the fermenter via a tap.

In commercial breweries, the wort is brewed for somewhere between one and two hours at a rolling boil - enough time for the proteins to emerge and form small whitish flakes in the wort, which we brewers delight in calling the ‘hot break'. Virtually all the bitterness of whatever hops you've added can be extracted in about 45 minutes.

The big difference between a canned kit from the supermarket or homebrew shop, and a wort kit is the freshness. Wort kits are brewed using the finest available raw ingredients - locally grown malted barley, wheat, hops and water - and filled hot, straight from the brewery kettle, ensuring full mash quality without the hard work. With such high gravity wort, all you have to do when you get the kit home is add water and yeast. Here's how:

Starting Your Brew

1. Empty the contents of the cask into your sterilised fermenter.
2. Add five litres of cold water to bring the final volume to 20 litres.
3. Now it's time to take the original gravity (OG) reading with your hydrometer.
4. Mix in the yeast and give the wort a really good stir. Cover the fermenter and fix the airlock, which is half-filled with water, in place.

Fermentation

After the yeast has been added, it will take 6-12 hours for fermentation to start. The fermentation process will be complete in anywhere from four to nine days. This depends on temperature, beer style and type of yeast. It's very important that a constant brewing temperature is maintained. Keep the fermenter within the temperature range required by the yeast you're using. If your brew's too warm, you may end up with some very undesirable flavours and it may also lead to clarity and head-retention problems. The optimal temperature for ales is 20-24C while for lagers it's 12-18C.

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