What (are the 10 items) you wish you had when you started brewing and keg dispensing? BONUS ROUND
Number 11 – That’s right, this one goes to Eleven
Brewing all grain beers is definitely how to get the truest, richest and most authentic flavours. Extract beers just don’t have the impact and often have that sort of weird, inauthentic TWANG that gives them away. Sure you can hide the extract with partial mashing but it’s more work. Any way you look at it, all grain brewing, extract brewing and partial mash extract brewing take time to do properly. Five hours for a full brew day sometimes at least including clean up.
Enter the Fresh Wort Kit!
10 minutes to make. You just pour them into the fermenter, top up with water (or not and get a stronger beer!) pitch the yeast and seal up the fermenter. Done.
The kits are all grain beers that have been captured in the packaging without O2. The process of making them is pretty much an Australian innovation that came out of the drought.
*Daniel pulls up a rocking chair…
Now way back in Ought Six I remember being in a little brewing course here in Victoria, Australia. The whole State was in the depths of a drought, water restrictions were pretty tight. Neighbours would rat out other neighbours for using water frivolously often resulting in fines.
Homebrewers with their immersion chillers were never going to get away with blasting all their cooling water down the drain, down the driveway or out into the garden. They had to get clever, and boy did they ever!
I remember talking to another student in the brewing course who was a chemist by trade and he had this crazy solution to the water consumption of cooling wort. He knocked the wort out of his kettle directly into HDPE containers that he used for drinking water when he’d go camping, getting them so full there would be no air when he put the cap on. Then he’d let them cool naturally.
Of course this meant that the cubes needed to be clean and that the recipe needed to change to account for remaining hot for so long. After some trial and error, he had the whole method down and we tried the beers that were the result of the ‘No Chill’ method. Those beers were absolutely fine. Delicious.
Not only did Fresh Wort Kits save water, it also saved time.
All the rubbish we thought would happen like botulism, spoilage, foul tasting beer and lack of body were all proved to be wrong with every sip of those initial no chill beers. It changed the game.
Suddenly it became normal to just grab a 15 litre kit of all grain wort, bang it into your fermenter and pitch yeast. All the styles are available. You can always add more ingredients. In the event that you weren’t going to get 5 hours on a weekend to brew your own batch because of family commitments or whatever, you could forgo having an empty keg and simply ferment a wort kit, which takes 10 minutes to prepare, ALWAYS tastes better than beer from extract because it has never been reduced under vacuum into a syrup and then canned or evaporated into spray malt powder. Both extract varieties, liquid (LME) or dry (DME) lack a certain malt crispness and flavour compared to Fresh Wort Kits because it is zapped after they are reduced into their new form syrup or powder forms.
So, the new king of the homebrew world is the Fresh Wort Kit. Some countries like Freedomhotdogland and EngelbergTeacrumpetsland have no clue and are still cowering like shivering wet cats at the idea they might get botulism from this method because homebrewers are still being fed the idea that canned wort isn’t possible due to infections. That’s absolute rubbish.
We Australians have been enjoying the ease and perfection of Fresh Wort Kits now for almost 20 years. It’s been a huge step forward for new brewers, and a fantastic, convenient advantage for experienced brewers who are short on time.
It’s not cheating. It’s just a Fresh Wort Kit.
The entire Artisan Ale Range of Fresh Wort Kits are now available from Keg King, made in Springvale, Victoria.
I highly suggest you check them out.
