Two of the most popular beer kits currently are the Mr. Beer kit as well as the Northern Brewer kit. Making a decision between these two popular styles can often be beneficial when you are searching out the best investment for your own home brewing. Making a good decision will help to ensure that you can get a kit which is a great value as well as easy-to-use.
Here are some of the pros and cons of each one of these kits and which one that we prefer most as expert brewers.
The Mr. Beer Kit (Premium Gold Edition)
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The Mr. Beer kit is strongly recommended as one of the cheapest brewing systems available in the world right now.
The entire system is sold with everything that you need to make a small batch of craft beer in the comfort of your own home.
In most cases, the materials provided with the Mr. Beer kit are designed for beginners and they can provide almost all of the materials in a small package.
The Mr. Beer kit works almost like a personal science kit, it delivers great tasting beer and a small amount and with easy-to-follow instructions.
The reviews for Mr. Beer are generally fairly positive but it is definitely a system for smaller batches of beer.
Features:
Included in a Mr. Beer kit are all of the ingredients that are required to make 2 gallons of beer in two batches.
A Mr. Beer kit comes with everything you need to brew a total of 4 gallons of beer (2 refills included).
The instructions provided in the kit are delivered by master brewers and all of the kits that come along with the materials are designed by Cooper’s brewery to deliver consistent results.
The one-step brewing fermenter is the main item that Mr. Beer is known for.
It’s designed as a smaller version of a brewing fermenter with a raised spigot and trub collector.
This is the type of small fermenter that is commonly used in brewing test batches of beer at major breweries across the world. Although it has been heavily miniaturized. Using this kit ensures that there is no need for a secondary fermentation process.
The shatterproof bottles also included will allow people to easily store and perform testing to see if the beer is done carbonated.
Mr. Beer is a system that is designed to heavily improve the speed and ease of homebrewing making it extremely beginner-friendly.
As an added bonus, Mr. Beer also has a wide degree of choice when it comes to be types of beers it has on offer. With several different beers including American light, Oktoberfest lager, Aztec Cerveza, Canadian Blonde, Czech pilsner or Bavarian Wheat beer, users can easily customize the kits that they may want to pick out for their next batch or pick out a kit with a beer style they love to begin with.
The pros:
- Beginner-friendly
- Super inexpensive
- Comes with everything you need
- Excellent instructions
- 2 refills included
The cons:
- Because of its simplification, doesn’t reproduce the exact process of brewing beer
- Brews only small batches
- Not designed for heavy experimentation, mostly for use with Coopers brewery methods only.
Northern Brewer – 1 Gallon Craft Beer Making Starter Kit
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The Northern Brewer 1 gallon starter kit is one of the newest kits to brew high-quality craft beer in the comfort of your own home.
This Minnesota-based startup is producing a 1-gallon small batch kit that includes everything that a user might need to brew high-quality craft beer.
The fermentation jug with an airlock and mini siphon gives new brewers everything that they need to brew a high-quality beer with fresh ingredients.
Unlike some other types of beginner kits, this is a homebrew kit that will have people almost immediately brewing beer in the fresh and basic way.
Steeping grain, adding in sugar, using the yeast and more.
Gaining this type of experience can give people the chance to actually scale up their progress and enjoy brewing natural beer without the use of a quick malt kit.
Northern Brewer with its small batches is able to produce a beer that is ready to drink within just a month of getting started.
While some other quick kits can produce beer within just a few weeks, this is a longer process that can deliver results more comparable to what you might find at a local craft brewery.
Features:
Included in this kit are a 1-gallon jug fermenter, a three-piece airlock, oxygen wash cleanser, bottle filler, high-quality beer bottles, a racking cane, tubing and bottle caps. There’s everything inside this kit to actually produce a full bottle of beer just like you would get from any local brewery, only with your distinct flavoring and labels.
Ultimately, this is a kit that’s done on a very small scale but with all of the same processes that any major producer would use to produce fresh beer from grains.
Learning this process can be an eye-opening experience upfront and it can give you the power to source your own ingredients and begin growing a much larger scale.
Instead of using any type of canned extract the fresh ingredients that are included here are items that you could pick up at almost any type of Brewer retail.
Replenishing your kit is as easy as ordering replacement ingredients from Northern Brewer or picking up these ingredients yourself for refilling the fermenter.
Pros:
- Comes with everything needed for a quality batch of fresh homebrew
- 4 types of recipes (American Wheat, Caribou Slobber Brown Ale, Irisho Red Ale, Smashing Pumpkin)
- A quick DVD guide
- Repeatable results
- Fresh tasting product
- Support 7 days a week
Cons:
- Doesn’t come with bottles nor a brew pot
- A gallon of beer is a small homebrew kit at roughly 10 bottles of beer per batch.
Read my complete review about the Northern Brewer 1-gallon kit, I’ve used this kit for quite a few batches.
Comparing the two kits
The two kits are overall fairly comparable for beginner brewers.
If you are looking for a kit that is going to be friendly for beginners, either one can offer its own advantages.
The DVD instructions and the quality of ingredients are a little bit better in the Northern Brewer kit but the overall cost of brew beer is significantly reduced with the cost of the Mr. Beer kit.
When it boils down to it, there are some fantastic arguments for either kit as one of the best options for someone is interested in the idea of brewing for the first time.
If you are looking for a kit that is a small-scale version of what craft brewers are doing across the world, it’s likely a much better idea to pick up the Northern Brewers kit over Mr. Beer. Although Mr. Beer is one of the biggest names in affordable brewing and likely one of the first beer kits that many brewers got started with to find their passion, the Northern Brewers kit is a far superior idea for learning the basics of brewing with grain.
The knowledge that you can gain from the Northern brewing kit can help you scale up your homebrewing technique.
When you start to produce consistent results with this kit, you can start to scale up some of your production and begin the process of even brewing in large batches.
The Northern Brewers brewing kit is more a stepping stone for brewing purists that really want to get started the process of brewing their own beer.
If you find something that works with this kit, all you really need to do is source a new fermentation tank that is larger and then scale up some of the recipes that they provided with new fresh ingredients.
This is one of the best ways that you can dip your toe into the waters of homebrewing without ruining a very large batch of beer.
As a practice kit, it produces delicious and fresh beer and it is one of the best ways to actually learn the process of brewing for the first time.
Last update on 2024-03-28 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
