Beer and Brewer Magazine

Mark from Mark's Home Brew gives us the skinny on premium lager kits.

Lagers are the most popular beers in the world but they can be tricky for the home brewer to make. Mark from Mark's Home Brew road tests a selection of premium lager can kits that will improve your results.

With 90 percent of the beers consumed the world over being lagers, it comes as a surprise to most home brewers to find they have never made a lager at home.

Lager is made with a special family of yeasts that works at much colder temperatures than most people home brew. Brewing with true lager yeast over 15-16˚C can cause a great lager to smell like rotten eggs as the yeast gives off hydrogen sulphide.

Most lager kits come with an ale yeast and when making a ‘lager', most brewers are in fact making a hoppier pale ale. Lager brewing is a very different process - you generally need to brew in a fridge and brews take 21-28 days to complete.

Most supermarkets stock a range of lager kits, but below is a selection of the premium products only available through home brew shops. Most of these kits are priced between $15 - $20. While they won't give you a true lager, they will give you a good approximation. To take the next step you will need to get a fridge for your fermenter and a temperature controller. Controllers can cost between $50 - $100 for a digital unit.

Muntons Premium Lager

Muntons kits have a characteristic flavour with hints of toffee sweetness and caramel. These kits are amongst the best in the world and if you were looking for lager style beer with the sweeter notes typical of southern Germany, you could do worse than to brew this kit. I would recommend using a kilo of Muntons dried light malt and adding a little Hallertau hop to balance the extra sweetness and provide a subtle hop aroma.

Brewcraft Imported Munich Lager

This kit is also made by Muntons. Not only does it come with the high quality yeast that all Muntons products are supplied with, it comes at a much more competitive price. Subtly different to the Muntons Premium Lager, the colour and malt profile are more reminiscent of Heineken than any other commercial beer. Again, a malt and hop addition would optimise the results of this world class kit.

Morgan's Blue Mountains Lager

One of the finest brew kits made in Australia, Morgan's have a reputation for turning out great beers. Blue Mountain Lager comes with a little Hallertau hop oil included in the formulation. This hop extract is imported from Germany and is worth well over $1,500 per litre. As you can imagine they do not use a whole lot in each kit, but WOW! A little makes a BIG difference.

Thomas Coopers Lager

A relative new-comer in the Australian market, the Thomas Coopers range are not the ones you see in supermarkets. These are the ones Coopers turn out when they want to make really good kits. This is one of the best selling kits in my shop. Its simplicity and high quality make it an ideal base to build any lager on. Coopers recommend that you add a 1.5 kg can of light malt. For my taste, "all malt beers" benefit from the addition of a little hops to balance the sweetness from all that malt. This kit is no exception.

Of this selection, the two standout beers for me are the Morgan's Blue Mountain Lager and the Brewcraft Imported Munich Lager, but for very different reasons.

The subtlety and delicate hop aroma of the Blue Mountain lager makes it easy to produce extremely drinkable beer time after time without a lot of mucking around. This kit would benefit from a yeast upgrade and a fermentable addition that contained plenty of malt.

Brewcraft Imported Munich Lager is a fabulous base for those brewers who want to tinker. The addition of yeast made by Saf included in the price of the kit saves you around $4.40, which is what would be charged for a yeast just as good.

If you want to make great beers you could do worse than to get yourself along to a good home brew shop, one that stocks a decent range of hops, malts and yeast as well as some premium home brew kits.

Premium products will cost you twice as much, but if your beer doesn't taste four times better, don't go back!

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