Review by Otto for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System Rating:
I received the Mr. Beer kit for Xmas, and it’s a good system overall. It serves as a very good introduction to home brewing, but it does have some downsides as well.
Good bits:
-The system is about as easy as it could be.
-The instructions are clear and simple.
-The fermenting tank is small (2 gallons), meaning that you don’t have to wait around for a long time to taste the final product. With your more normal 5 gallon kits, you have to bottle a LOT of beer, and wait a bit longer for fermentation.
-There’s dozens of mixes available on their homepage, and they offer a lot of quality products at reasonable prices. Join their club to avoid the expensive shipping charges.
Not so good bits:
-The fermenter is almost too simple. A proper airlock design would make it more foolproof as to tell when fermenting is complete, as well as avoiding contamination of the beer.
-The included mixes, while of good quality, produce a rather poor beer by comparison to what it is possible to make with the kit. Their website has a lot better product than what they include in the kit, and this gives some people bad impressions of the kit itself. The fault is not with the kit, but with the very basic starter beer in the package. The separate mixes they sell in stores are not much better, being all very basic brews. They’re not bad, but they’re not great either. Mediocre at best.
-Sterilization (which is possibly the most important part of home brewing) is difficult because the fermenter is not dishwasher safe. A higher quality plastic that could stand high temperatures would be a better overall choice for the fermenting keg, since automatic dishwashers are a great way to sterilize your equipment easily.
My suggestions on how to use this kit correctly:
-Go to their website and pick up some of the more advanced receipes instead of using the mixes as given initially. If you’ve used those included mixes, don’t be disappointed overall, it’s that the mixes are very basic. Using the better receipes and the better ingredients, you can make quite incredible brews.
-Keep the fermenter in an enclosed dark space during the fermenting process. I recommend a large cooler. This avoids contamination of the product as well as keeping it at a steady temparature.
-Be very, very careful to sterilize completely. The OneStep cleanser they include is very good, but you do have to use it properly. Read the instructions and be sure that everything gets cleaned extremely well.
-No matter what the instructions say, bottle conditioning takes longer than a week. Really. Wait 2 weeks, preferably 4, before you crack the first bottle. The beer only gets better the longer you let it mature in the bottles.
-Go easy on the sugar. Too much sugar in the bottles and they will explode, or taste like cider.
If you use the kit as intended and with a careful eye for cleanliness, then you can produce some excellent quality brews in a very short time. But follow those instructions precisely. Anything less will result in poor quality brews.
—-
After using it for over a year, I have some more things to add:
- DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN THE LID. The lid must allow the gases produced MUST escape. This is especially true with their higher alcohol mixes and stouts. If you overtighten, the end result will be spilled beer and a ruined keg. I brewed a dopplebock using the keg, and overtightened it. Result: The keg overpressurized and almost burst. Some foam came out of the top of the keg, and spilled into my cooler. The residue, once it dried, provided food for.. well.. not so nice creatures. The keg was naturally unusable afterwards. However, this was my own fault, and a new keg only cost me $10 through the Mr. Beer website, so it was not a total loss. And the beer (since it was not contaminated due to the pressure differential, I bottled it anyway) turned out to be absolutely spectacular. So whatever you do, don’t tighten it too much. A little hand pressure for tightening is enough.
- Again, go easy on the sugar when bottling! Somebody told me that they had one of the plastic bottles burst on them and the remainder tasted like cider. This is the result of excessive sugar in the bottling process. I highly recommend you get the sugar measure that they sell, if you are bottling in the 12oz, 22oz, or 1 liter sizes. The sugar measure is very easy to use and exact in nature. Takes out the measurements and guesswork.
- Finally, I do not recommend normal bottles with a capper. These are difficult to use and contrary to popular belief, do not produce better beer. The screw top bottles are simplest because they hold the pressure in properly and are trivially simple to use. Alternatively, Mr. Beer sells 16 oz “Grolsch style” bottles on their site, which are the rubber grommeted wired cappers, and they work very well. If you must bottle with glass, get those. Or go find similarly capped bottles of beer and use those bottles (after dishwashing, of course). Glass is much easier to sterilize because it’s disahwasher safe. Just take the rubber caps off first.
Review by sweepking for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System Rating:
Having read most of the reviews here for Mr. Beer I felt I would add my two cents. I have brewed beer using the standard “medieval sorcery” kit that is advertised on most homebrew websites and with the Mr. Beer kit. Having done both, I prefer the Mr. Beer kit. The Mr. Beer kit is a great introduction to brewing. You can make it as simple as you want or do more complicated things with it as well. It is simply a scaled-down, stand-alone, and single-stage fermenter. If you want to do a full boil on your wort, add fruits etc. and use it for that, it can work just as well as any other plastic pail. The nice thing for beginners is that it comes with nearly everything for brewing your first beer for half the price of even the cheapest “starter” kits at most brew shops. The thing that I like about it versus other systems is that it makes a smaller amount, takes up less space, and Mr. Beer, as a company, is really dedicated to making homebrewing simple and fun. I have emailed them with various questions and comments, and their service has been impeccable. They have some great recipes and products available, all scaled down to a more manageable size in my opinion. I think the system itself is acceptable quality. The keg is sturdy enough, dark colored to protect against UV, and the spicket works well. The venting system at first seemed to be a little on the cheap side (airlock would probably be better, particularly in judging when fermentation is complete-earlier models had them), but I have had no problems with beer spoilage. Mr. Beer is a great place to start (and stay) if you are looking to start brewing your own beer as a hobby and not spend hours cleaning equipment, preparing mashes/worts to precise temperatures, and spending an hour bottling 5 gallons worth of beer every three weeks.
Review by A. Pendergast for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System Rating:
I got the Mr. Beer kit from a buddy a few weeks before Christmas, and have been having an absolute blast with it! By far the best Christmas present I got this year. The nice part about Mr. Beer is that the standard recipe process is very easy to do (read: very hard to screw up). This gives an inexperienced brewer like me the confidence to be imaginitive and creative, while keeping the chances of really messing up a batch pretty low. I’ve already done standard ales, honey wheat ale, and honey-apple ale. All taste very good, and the taste continues to improve!! This is a MUST-have gift for any die-hard beer drinker!!
Review by Phil McGlass for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System Rating:
Overall, I think this is a good product. It worked quite well and the instructions were clear and easy to understand. In my opinion, I made good beer on my first attempt. I will continue to try the other recipes.
Evaluating this on taste is purely subjective and highly biased on what you consider as good beer. The first batch is an Ale, not a lager like most americans prefer to drink. Most store bought beer is also over carbonated so it can sit on the shelf. If you have bad results, one of three things occurred; didn’t follow instructions/recomendations, malt/yeast product was old, or simply you don’t like the style of beer. Ale is fermented at warmer temperatures than lager so it will taste different.
If cheap plain beer is want you are after, this is not for you. You are better off going to the liquor store. If you want to try different styles and obsess over the process, ingredients and the taste, you will like this.
The thing I like the most is the 2 gallon batch size. Its not too big. – I don’t drink very often or a lot at any one time so w/ only 2 gallons I won’t have a lot drink before the next batch. Especially if its not my favorite type and since making it is half of the fun anyhow.
By trade, I am a Chemical Process Engineer so I am analytical, methodical and deliberate in every thing I do. If you are anything like me and you like beer made at micro breweries you will enjoy this product!
Review by for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System Rating:
Mr. Beer’s home brew kit a great, fun way to introduce yourself to the art and craft of homebrewing. I recieved Mr. Beer as a Christmas gift from my wife, and have enjoyed it thourougly. The wonder of brewing beer at home is that it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. I’ve brewed beer at home on a few occaisions, and the typical home brew process and equipment can be a bit intimidating to the neophyte. Sorry, but a plastic 5 gallon bucket full of wort does not inspire confidence. The beer snobs you find at most home brew shops only add to the difficulty of the process, and the books available on the subject seem to be writen with chemists and moonshiners in mind. Mr. Beer takes the guess work out of the process, allowing the newbie home brewer to proceed with confidence. Brewing beer at home is as simple as preparing condensed soup. But what if you want to experiment with fruit beers? Different kinds of hops? Different malt blends? Lager yeasts?Never fear. Mr. Beer is marvelously flexible, allowing you to take your home brewing as far as you like, and the recipes and instructions included with the kit show you exactly how to do it. Mr. Beer also offers a wide variety of malts and hops, as well as both ale and lager yeasts premeasured for use with their kit. The only real downside to Mr. Beer’s brew kit is that you are more or less restricted to using Mr. Beer malt extracts. Most malt extracts come in 3 lb cans, standard for a 5 gallon brew, but Mr. Beer uses a 2 lbs can. Measuring out the malt can be messy, and there’s really no way to preserve the left-overs. If you really want to broaden your beer horizons, you’ll eventually graduate to the more standard 5 gallon set up. Bottom Line: Mr. Beer is the perfect way to find out if home brewing is something you’d like to do. There’s no significant financial investment in the equipment, and there’s lots of room to try different techniques explore different ingredients. Highly recommended.
Review by Otto for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System
Rating:
I received the Mr. Beer kit for Xmas, and it’s a good system overall. It serves as a very good introduction to home brewing, but it does have some downsides as well.
Good bits:
-The system is about as easy as it could be.
-The instructions are clear and simple.
-The fermenting tank is small (2 gallons), meaning that you don’t have to wait around for a long time to taste the final product. With your more normal 5 gallon kits, you have to bottle a LOT of beer, and wait a bit longer for fermentation.
-There’s dozens of mixes available on their homepage, and they offer a lot of quality products at reasonable prices. Join their club to avoid the expensive shipping charges.
Not so good bits:
-The fermenter is almost too simple. A proper airlock design would make it more foolproof as to tell when fermenting is complete, as well as avoiding contamination of the beer.
-The included mixes, while of good quality, produce a rather poor beer by comparison to what it is possible to make with the kit. Their website has a lot better product than what they include in the kit, and this gives some people bad impressions of the kit itself. The fault is not with the kit, but with the very basic starter beer in the package. The separate mixes they sell in stores are not much better, being all very basic brews. They’re not bad, but they’re not great either. Mediocre at best.
-Sterilization (which is possibly the most important part of home brewing) is difficult because the fermenter is not dishwasher safe. A higher quality plastic that could stand high temperatures would be a better overall choice for the fermenting keg, since automatic dishwashers are a great way to sterilize your equipment easily.
My suggestions on how to use this kit correctly:
-Go to their website and pick up some of the more advanced receipes instead of using the mixes as given initially. If you’ve used those included mixes, don’t be disappointed overall, it’s that the mixes are very basic. Using the better receipes and the better ingredients, you can make quite incredible brews.
-Keep the fermenter in an enclosed dark space during the fermenting process. I recommend a large cooler. This avoids contamination of the product as well as keeping it at a steady temparature.
-Be very, very careful to sterilize completely. The OneStep cleanser they include is very good, but you do have to use it properly. Read the instructions and be sure that everything gets cleaned extremely well.
-No matter what the instructions say, bottle conditioning takes longer than a week. Really. Wait 2 weeks, preferably 4, before you crack the first bottle. The beer only gets better the longer you let it mature in the bottles.
-Go easy on the sugar. Too much sugar in the bottles and they will explode, or taste like cider.
If you use the kit as intended and with a careful eye for cleanliness, then you can produce some excellent quality brews in a very short time. But follow those instructions precisely. Anything less will result in poor quality brews.
—-
After using it for over a year, I have some more things to add:
- DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN THE LID. The lid must allow the gases produced MUST escape. This is especially true with their higher alcohol mixes and stouts. If you overtighten, the end result will be spilled beer and a ruined keg. I brewed a dopplebock using the keg, and overtightened it. Result: The keg overpressurized and almost burst. Some foam came out of the top of the keg, and spilled into my cooler. The residue, once it dried, provided food for.. well.. not so nice creatures. The keg was naturally unusable afterwards. However, this was my own fault, and a new keg only cost me $10 through the Mr. Beer website, so it was not a total loss. And the beer (since it was not contaminated due to the pressure differential, I bottled it anyway) turned out to be absolutely spectacular. So whatever you do, don’t tighten it too much. A little hand pressure for tightening is enough.
- Again, go easy on the sugar when bottling! Somebody told me that they had one of the plastic bottles burst on them and the remainder tasted like cider. This is the result of excessive sugar in the bottling process. I highly recommend you get the sugar measure that they sell, if you are bottling in the 12oz, 22oz, or 1 liter sizes. The sugar measure is very easy to use and exact in nature. Takes out the measurements and guesswork.
- Finally, I do not recommend normal bottles with a capper. These are difficult to use and contrary to popular belief, do not produce better beer. The screw top bottles are simplest because they hold the pressure in properly and are trivially simple to use. Alternatively, Mr. Beer sells 16 oz “Grolsch style” bottles on their site, which are the rubber grommeted wired cappers, and they work very well. If you must bottle with glass, get those. Or go find similarly capped bottles of beer and use those bottles (after dishwashing, of course). Glass is much easier to sterilize because it’s disahwasher safe. Just take the rubber caps off first.
Review by sweepking for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System
Rating:
Having read most of the reviews here for Mr. Beer I felt I would add my two cents. I have brewed beer using the standard “medieval sorcery” kit that is advertised on most homebrew websites and with the Mr. Beer kit. Having done both, I prefer the Mr. Beer kit. The Mr. Beer kit is a great introduction to brewing. You can make it as simple as you want or do more complicated things with it as well. It is simply a scaled-down, stand-alone, and single-stage fermenter. If you want to do a full boil on your wort, add fruits etc. and use it for that, it can work just as well as any other plastic pail. The nice thing for beginners is that it comes with nearly everything for brewing your first beer for half the price of even the cheapest “starter” kits at most brew shops. The thing that I like about it versus other systems is that it makes a smaller amount, takes up less space, and Mr. Beer, as a company, is really dedicated to making homebrewing simple and fun. I have emailed them with various questions and comments, and their service has been impeccable. They have some great recipes and products available, all scaled down to a more manageable size in my opinion. I think the system itself is acceptable quality. The keg is sturdy enough, dark colored to protect against UV, and the spicket works well. The venting system at first seemed to be a little on the cheap side (airlock would probably be better, particularly in judging when fermentation is complete-earlier models had them), but I have had no problems with beer spoilage. Mr. Beer is a great place to start (and stay) if you are looking to start brewing your own beer as a hobby and not spend hours cleaning equipment, preparing mashes/worts to precise temperatures, and spending an hour bottling 5 gallons worth of beer every three weeks.
Review by A. Pendergast for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System
Rating:
I got the Mr. Beer kit from a buddy a few weeks before Christmas, and have been having an absolute blast with it! By far the best Christmas present I got this year.
The nice part about Mr. Beer is that the standard recipe process is very easy to do (read: very hard to screw up). This gives an inexperienced brewer like me the confidence to be imaginitive and creative, while keeping the chances of really messing up a batch pretty low. I’ve already done standard ales, honey wheat ale, and honey-apple ale. All taste very good, and the taste continues to improve!!
This is a MUST-have gift for any die-hard beer drinker!!
Review by Phil McGlass for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System
Rating:
Overall, I think this is a good product. It worked quite well and the instructions were clear and easy to understand. In my opinion, I made good beer on my first attempt. I will continue to try the other recipes.
Evaluating this on taste is purely subjective and highly biased on what you consider as good beer. The first batch is an Ale, not a lager like most americans prefer to drink. Most store bought beer is also over carbonated so it can sit on the shelf. If you have bad results, one of three things occurred; didn’t follow instructions/recomendations, malt/yeast product was old, or simply you don’t like the style of beer. Ale is fermented at warmer temperatures than lager so it will taste different.
If cheap plain beer is want you are after, this is not for you. You are better off going to the liquor store. If you want to try different styles and obsess over the process, ingredients and the taste, you will like this.
The thing I like the most is the 2 gallon batch size. Its not too big. – I don’t drink very often or a lot at any one time so w/ only 2 gallons I won’t have a lot drink before the next batch. Especially if its not my favorite type and since making it is half of the fun anyhow.
By trade, I am a Chemical Process Engineer so I am analytical, methodical and deliberate in every thing I do. If you are anything like me and you like beer made at micro breweries you will enjoy this product!
Review by for Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Microbrewery System
Rating:
Mr. Beer’s home brew kit a great, fun way to introduce yourself to the art and craft of homebrewing. I recieved Mr. Beer as a Christmas gift from my wife, and have enjoyed it thourougly.
The wonder of brewing beer at home is that it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. I’ve brewed beer at home on a few occaisions, and the typical home brew process and equipment can be a bit intimidating to the neophyte. Sorry, but a plastic 5 gallon bucket full of wort does not inspire confidence. The beer snobs you find at most home brew shops only add to the difficulty of the process, and the books available on the subject seem to be writen with chemists and moonshiners in mind.
Mr. Beer takes the guess work out of the process, allowing the newbie home brewer to proceed with confidence. Brewing beer at home is as simple as preparing condensed soup.
But what if you want to experiment with fruit beers? Different kinds of hops? Different malt blends? Lager yeasts?Never fear. Mr. Beer is marvelously flexible, allowing you to take your home brewing as far as you like, and the recipes and instructions included with the kit show you exactly how to do it. Mr. Beer also offers a wide variety of malts and hops, as well as both ale and lager yeasts premeasured for use with their kit.
The only real downside to Mr. Beer’s brew kit is that you are more or less restricted to using Mr. Beer malt extracts. Most malt extracts come in 3 lb cans, standard for a 5 gallon brew, but Mr. Beer uses a 2 lbs can. Measuring out the malt can be messy, and there’s really no way to preserve the left-overs. If you really want to broaden your beer horizons, you’ll eventually graduate to the more standard 5 gallon set up.
Bottom Line: Mr. Beer is the perfect way to find out if home brewing is something you’d like to do. There’s no significant financial investment in the equipment, and there’s lots of room to try different techniques explore different ingredients. Highly recommended.