Starter Home Brewery With Organic 7 Bridges Red Ale Ingredients
Before brewing your first batch of beer, you will need to obtain the basic equipment. Just like a good cook needs a well equipped kitchen, a home brewer will need a well equipped brewery to produce quality beer at home. Our starter kit includes our Organic 7 Bridges Red Ale ingredient kit for 5 gallons and the book “The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing”, by Charlie Papazian. We believe knowledge is the most important brewing tool you can ever have, and a full featured brewing guide like this book makes the process of acquiring knowledge easy and fun. Our starter kit has everything you need to brew 5 gallons of beer except a brew pot (a stainless steel stock pot at least 3 gallons in size) and standard beer bottles. Any non twist off or flip-top beer bottle can be used. Included in this package deal: One organic beer ingredient kit (not in picture), a glass 5 gallon carboy, plastic airlock, rubber, stopper, 40″ blow-off tube, 5′ siphon tubing, 22″ curved siphon cane with sediment tip, small tubing clamp, small organic cotton straining bag, 18″ heat resistant plastic spoon, bottle filling wand, bottle capper, 60 bottle caps, bottle brush, long water bottle brush with bent tufted end, 8″ plastic funnel with snap in screen, the book: “The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, 3rd Edition”, 4 oz. of Iodophor sanitizer (safe iodine based), & 8 oz. of Straight-A oxygen based home brewery cleaner.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars Great kit!
Bought this for my boyfriend who has been wanting to brew for a while. He’s a ‘semi-beginner’, because he has read a lot on the process, knows the basics, visited breweries etc, just hadn’t started on his own yet. He LOVES it & finds it easy and quick to do without being ‘so beginner’ that it’s boring.
5 Stars Easy to make great low cost beer at home – and organic too!
This came in a well packaged box with all the pieces and ingredients well-labelled and easy to understand for a complete beginner.
I thought it would be a lot more complicated than it was, but following the one-page instructions it was actually really easy. It only took me 2 hours to brew a batch of my own, organic red ale from scratch!
The equipment is also a lot simpler and smaller than I expected. Basically all you need is a big pot, like a chili pot, to boil the beer in, and then a big plastic bucket to store it in (where it ferments). Then after a week I bottled it, which also took about two hours, and within three days I tasted the first bottle. Yeehaw! It was good! I’m already thinking that I’m going to try bottling in bigger bottles or maybe even a keg in order to reduce the work involved in bottling. It was actually really satisfying to clamp the lids down on the bottles and know that I had just manufactured my own bottle of beer, but on the other hand, it looks like there are a bunch of equipment options that making bottling easier, so I might upgrade.
Bottom line, after seeing how easy this was, I’m going to be brewing a lot. It was fast, definately cheaper than buying beer of equivalent quality, plus now my friends think I’m really cool. I’m starting to worry that their enthusiasm for my beer might deplete my supply pretty fast though. Considering how good the beer turned out and how easy the whole thing was, I’m going to encourage them to get their own brewing hobby going. All the more beer for the rest of us!
One aspect of this kit that seems unique is that the ingredients are all organic. I buy some organic food, and I really like beer, so I figure it just makes sense that if I don’t want nasty chemicals in my food, I certainly don’t want them in my beer. So the organic aspect of this kit was a real bonus. Three cheers to Seven Bridges for making this available.
2 Stars Old ingredients makes for a dull brew
I had high hopes for an organic brew. I was at the hop addition stage and after snipping open the hop bag I was greeted with some old, not very fragrant hops. Turned out they were 2006 and not well stored. At that stage of the brew you have no choice but to use them if you don’t happen to have a back up supply.
Sadly I have 5 gallons of drinkable but bland beer. The response of Seven Bridges – sorry someone should have pulled the old hops from the kits! I am going to toss some leftover hops from a different batch into the keg and see if I can perk it up a tad.
Moral here is to buy from suppliers that have higher turnover of the ingredients and check your ingredients carefully before the brew day.
4 Stars First time brewer
I recently purchased this brewing kit and have had a fantastic first time brewing experience. The instructions were easy to follow (although i suggest reading up on how to brew as much as possible…in fact you should buy How to Brew by John Palmer, it is a tremendous help). The only qualm I have with the kit itself is that the box that the ingredients (malt, hops, etc.) came in said that Yeast was NOT included…HOWEVER, it was actually included (which is a good thing) in the kit. It was not a particularly big deal, but i felt like a yutz when i went out to a local brew store to buy more yeast when i didn’t need to.
I also found myself dumping a bit more money on a thermometer, hydrometer, a long stainless steel spoon (the kit does come with a plastic spoon, but i didnt like the idea of using plastic), and stainless steel 5 gallon pot (ouch on the wallet). Was it worth it…absolutely. But keep in mind that if you want to do things right or turn brewing into a regular hobby you may have to dump a little more money into it.
Overall i’d say this is a fantastic kit and i am very pleased with what i got.
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