Brupaks Brewers Choice kits

Shiny

I was wondering if anyone here had made any of the brewers choice kits?

I recently made two of their kits, the Bavarian Weissbier and the Traditional IPA. To say I am disappointed is putting it mildly. The Weissbier has been in bottles for 5 weeks and the IPA for 3. I have been opening a bottle of each, every week since bottling and there has been no improvement whatsoever. Neither beer has any head regardless of how aggressive the pour and every kit I have brewed so far had shown some sort of life by this point.

The Weissbier has the typical banana type taste (just about) but it is still very sweet and extremely bland. The carbonation is also quite poor despite it being carbonated with coopers drops in the same way as any other kit I had made. The IPA is an even bigger disaster. It is very very bland, there is almost no flavor and it is also very sweet like the Weissbier. It tastes more like how an English bitter would taste after destroying your taste buds with a heavily hopped beer. I'm absolutely devastated with this as I love IPA's and I had high expectations after the great taste of the Coopers IPA kit.

Both kits fermented out as expected and reached a normal final gravity.

I have 2 beer tastings in the next couple of weeks and at this point I see no option but to avoid letting any of my friends taste these particular beers. I suppose I was naive in thinking the most expensive kits would give the best taste. :mad:

Has anyone else had a positive or negative experience with this particular kits?

Martyn1989

where the dates on the kits ok?

Shiny

I didn't check the dates when making them up but I assume they were fine as they were brand new stock in the store.

BeerNut

Sounds a bit like you've hit the limits of where kit brewing will take you, even slightly fancy kits like these. For better beer, go extract. Or switch kit brands.

What top-up fermentables did you use, and did you dry hop the IPA?

Shiny

Yeah those kits were probably going to be my last kit brews. My next one is going to be an extract and all future ones probably will be too.

They give you 3 options for fermentables, dextrose, dry malt extract or liquid malt extract. I went with the LME as it was recommended for the best taste and body. I have used the same LME before in other kits and had it seemed to be the right choice.

I didn't think I would need to dry hop the IPA, there was at least 2 bags of hops, possibly 3 in the kit that were seeped along with the grain. I had assumed that there would be plenty of flavour from them but I was very mistaken on this part. I reckon it is essential to dry hop this kit to get any sort of flavour from it.

poitinstill

I stick to coopers as with a littl tweak eg some hops or fresh grains you can get very good quality beers. i did their ipa with a flava-pak ( hop/grain bag to steep) , 1kg dme, dry hop with cascade and it IS a good beer very hopy and fresh tasting ..coopers kits wrk very well as a base for almost any beer. try their stout ( irish ) with 1kg dme and 200g brown sugar . or add 200g choc malt and 50g black malt for a very good choc stout.
Other than that i did 1 fixby gold kit and 1 st peters ipa kit that were top notch too ( all just dry hopped no other changes)

Shiny

I'm considering a crazed lunatic approach of emptying all the bottles back into the fermenter along with a hop tea, some water and 500g of DME. I'm not sure what I would add to improve the head retention(or creation in this case)...? I'm assuming the yeast in the bottles would restart the fermentation.

Is this sending more good money after bad or worth a shot?