Getting Creative In Your Kitchen To Make Prepackaged Homebrew Kits Unique

Pre-packaged beer kits. At one point or another, most homebrewers dabble with using them. I daresay most of us got our start either using such kits or at one of those "brew your own" places.

Even after about six years or so of homebrewing, I still pick up kits every now and then. They're an easy way to get a good, reliable brew without having to build a recipe from scratch. Plus, they're a lot of fun to mess around with, as I've written about before when I talked about homebrew kitbashing. You start off with one beer, you get a little crazy with it after rooting around in the kitchen cabinets for a bit, and the next thing you know you have something you can't find on store shelves.

As I recently wrote on Homebrew Talk:

The great thing about experimenting with your homebrew kits is that getting started is easy. All you need is a homebrew kit of your choice and an idea. The best ideas begin with a specific beer and spring naturally from that beer, so begin there.
I find that entry-level recipe kits for classic styles are best, as they tend to be simple enough to offer a lot of room for creativity while still providing a good base beer. Those old standards may seem boring in today’s world of mango ginger double IPAs, but the point is that they provide an excellent canvas upon which to paint.

It's fun stuff! I've had a great time messing around with kits and turning them into something new and different. To see how, and to get some tips on how you can do the same, check out my newest article on Homebrew Talk, Experimenting With Ingredients In Your Kitchen To Make Prepackaged Kits Unique.

Cheers!

KitBashing a Midwest Oatmeal Stout

Whether you’re a new brewer or an experienced brewer, “kitbashing” can be a fun and easy way to get wild and creative while brewing.

But first, let’s get this out of the way: For many, I’m using the term “kitbashing” incorrectly. Kitbashing is model aficionado lingo for taking pieces of existing models – tanks, planes, etc. – and building something new with them. To me, though, taking a beer kit and mixing and matching to create something new is in the same spirit, so let me coin it now for homebrewers.

The idea is simple. You take a beer kit from your local homebrew shop or a retailer like Midwest Supplies, you tweak it with other ingredients, adjustments, and your own creativity, and the end result is a new beer.

This is homebrew kitbashing! And this is a kit:

I LOVE to kitbash. I’ve done it since my earliest homebrew batches, and feel like it’s a big part of the fun of brewing. The great thing about it is, it’s EASY. You just have to be willing to have fun, take inspiration from beers you like, and to think outside the box.

Most recently, I tweaked two intro kits from Midwest. I generally find that basic, stripped down recipe kits make for great kitbashing fodder, because the recipes tend to be simple, clean, easy-to-brew, and wide open for creative possibilities. That means you have a great canvas to paint upon.

The first Midwest kit I played with was their oatmeal stout. Bashing up this kit into something new was easy. I’ve played with oatmeal stout kits in the past, using them as a base for my Old Kicker, a beer I look at as a session version of Founder’s Breakfast Stout. I took inspiration from a favorite beer, and it's what I suggest you do, too

For their oatmeal stout, my adjustments were easy. At flameout (the time when you stop the heat on your boil), add two packets of Swiss Miss milk chocolate mix.

Yep, that’s it. I’ve used baker’s chocolate powder and other variations on the theme in previous versions, but simple hot chocolate mix will do. The basic idea is, add enough chocolate mix, no matter the source, to make yourself 2-5 cups of hot cocoa, depending on strong you want the chocolate to be.

When you are ready to bottle – no less than three weeks later, in my opinion – brew roughly one cup (8 oz) of coffee. I have done the brewing many ways, from simply making a cup in our Keurig to cold-brewing a robust cup over the course of a few days. Results WILL vary depending on how you do it and your taste for coffee, so feel free to experiment (I’ll offer coffee advice in another post), but however you do it, make the coffee and add it at the same time you add your priming sugar or, if you keg, right to the keg.

And that’s it. That’s all you do. It's simple!

The result is a low-gravity, i.e. low alcohol, beer with rich, complex taste you won't expect from a simple, run-of-the-mill extract kit. I’ve done many variations on this over the years (including one with bourbon and oak chips, another with orange peel, and others), but the end result is almost always a pleasant, drinkable beer that emulates many of the flavors I want at a low, manageable ABV.

Consider doing this at home – and it works with almost ANY standard oatmeal stout. I first did it with my local homebrew shop’s recipes, and here applied it to Midwest’s. The results are similar.

The great thing is, kitbashing is fun and easy and CHEAP. I could make a list a mile long of kits I’ve “bashed” into something else. I took Midwest Supples’ Boundary Waters Wheat and added lemon peel, coriander, and sea salt to create a refreshing summer beer. I added some of my favorite hops to their Amber Ale and did it Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA style (additions staged over an hour) to make a hoppy amber. I’ve racked my local homebrew shop’s witbier onto cherries and raspberries and blackberries to create fruit beers. And so on

The ideas are endless. I have “bashed” countless kits and come up with many great beers. Some duds, sure, but that is part of experimenting. It’s part of the fun. So DO it!

For ideas and inspiration, I recommend Extreme Brewing by Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head fame, Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher, and your own creativity. These things + a disregard for the rules will result in awesome beers you have never tasted before!

HOMEBREWING: Summer weiss, one year later

In March 2011, I brewed a hefty summer weiss, a high(ish) gravity wheat beer fermented with Belgian yeast inspired by a recipe by Brewer's Apprentice. It was a beer intended for the summer months, something delicious and enjoyable for the warm weather, perfect for a fat slice of orange. And indeed, it was. I had brewed this beer two other times before to good results -- goes GREAT with an orange slice -- and looked forward to another batch.

Unfortunately, the beer was a dud. It never fully fermented out, leaving it overly thick and sweet, like a carbonated beer syrup. The coriander and orange peel I brewed it with were buried in all that sweetness. The result was that it was a beer I rarely opened because I just plain didn't like it.

That's why, some 15 months after I first brewed it, I still had a few bottles left. And amazingly, they were better more than a year after brewing than they were when fresh. Look how pretty it was:

This will not surprise some. One common theme you hear in homebrewing is, "Time heals all wounds."

That's not entirely true, of course. A bad beer is a bad beer. I've had lousy batches that stayed lousy. But the idea is, be PATIENT. Don't rush to judgement, and if you're not sure about your homebrew, don't drink it all right away.

With this beer, it was a much different beer than it was when fresh, so it's not as if it turned out the way I intended. It was far from the refreshing beer it was meant to be, but what it turned out to be was still good. It was an interesting, malty sipper with some compelling complexities from the Belgian yeast used.

Had I dumped this or given it away or rushed through drinking it just to be done with it, I'd never have known that the seeming dud I had would eventually turn out to be really good. And it's not the first time I brewed something that was ugly at first but that got tasty with time.

Homebrewers, be patient. Time doesn't actually heal ALL wounds, but it sure as hell heals a lot of them.

HOMEBREWING: Whiskey Barrel Imperial Stout

Last year, a friend and I put the whiskey barrel I bought to good use and brewed an imperial stout designed to be aged in said barrel. The recipe was, to say the least, intense. Easily the most expensive beer I have done to date, using a TON of specialty malts and in the end (thankfully) tasting comparable to Firestone Walker's Parabola, but here's the thing: It might also be the most delicious beer I've ever done. It's certainly the prettiest:

Looks wonderful, doesn't it? That's my co-brewer in the photo, and the beer is just a few weeks old (after a long primary and then secondary in the barrel). If you want the recipe, just ask. It's extract with specialty grains, so anyone can make it.

After the imperial stout, I did a honey porter in it, and the barrel currently contains a lambic, which will stay in the barrel for about a year or more. My plan is to blend small parts of that batch into future lambic and sour batches. (I currently have seven vessels with various sour beers, so the blending opportunities are endless!)

So here's the thing: Barrel-aging your beers is easy.

1) Buy a barrel! Just Google various phrases, there are TONS of sources. Spend between $70 and $120 (before shipping) for a 5-gallon barrel or you're getting ripped off.

2) Don't worry about cleaning it out. All that booze will keep it sterile. Just brew a big beer and put it in the barrel!

3) How long to age it? Keep the beer in it from two weeks to two years, depending on the beer. A weeks to two weeks is great for IPAs and Double IPAs, two to four weeks is ideal for traditional stouts and porters, four to eight weeks for barleywines and strong Belgian styles, and a month to two years for lambics.

4) Bottle, age, open, enjoy!

Yeah, seriously, it's that easy. I recommend bottling a few smaller sampler bottles so you can taste it over time -- barrel-aged beers tend to need some time to age into perfection, about six months to a year in my experience -- and going easy until it has aged into your taste. After that?

Cheers!