Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

You get what you pay for... a maxim we should all keep in mind.

Last night I cracked open my first bottle of my first brew with Mr. Beer. The result was disappointing. I didn't know what to expect, but the end product smelled and tasted more like cider than beer. It was very sweet and, oddly enough for a beer, had no detectable malt or hop flavor.

I fermented it for two full weeks, then bottled it and let it sit for another nine days. After that it went into the fridge for two days.

This beer poured with minimal head, which instantly disappeared. Carbonation was very light. The color was that of apple juice. As I said before, it tasted very sweet. As far as I could tell, there were no off-flavors, so at least there's that. Go sanitization.

In related news, I'll be selling my Mr. Beer kit on craigslist. Time to upgrade.

The idea behind the Mr. Beer kit is a good one.  It basically tried, somewhat successfully, to get homebrewing out to a wider audience during the craft brewing explosion.  The real issue behind some of the flavors you get from it is that it takes a number of short cuts to make it easy for folks to try homebrewing.  The biggest ones are not doing a boil or using hops or other specialty grains.  It is these items that give beer its wide variety of different styles and flavors.  I would certainly encourage you to try homebrewing using some of the basic equipment that we are planning to introduce (and did a bit last meeting).  It is not that expensive and can give you excellent results.  The key is to start with the basic stuff, then upgrade equipment as you see something that interests you.

Incidentally, I heard about a competition on a podcast once that required all its beers to be brewed in a Mr. Beer.  The winners made some outstanding beer, but they did it with full-wort boils including hops and all the other standard fair, then siphoned the beer into the Mr. Beer for fermenting.