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Does anyone have any experience with the Mr. Beer kits? I know it's a very amateur way to brew beer, but it was really cheap on Woot a few weeks back so I thought it'd be a good place to start. It came with some ingredients to use and you can buy refills on their website, but I've also heard you can use the "keg" and other accessories with real home brewing ingredients.

I haven't done anything with it yet besides open the box, but I'd really like to get into the home brewing scene. A friend of mine (fellow BGSU grad) is part of the Ann Arbor Brewer's Guild so I'm thinking of checking that out as well.

I have never used one myself, but from what I've read you can use the Mr. Beer equipment to make decent beer, but you don't want to mess with their ingredients. I think it's all pre-hopped stuff so you basically just add water and ferment as opposed to any of the real brewing process. Unless they've branched out a bit in their ingredients, that's the way it used to be.

The other thing to remember is that the Mr. Beer fermenter is only 2.5 gallons instead of the standard 5 gallons. Unless you have 2 of them that will make it difficult to buy ingredient kits, because all of the standard kits will make twice as much as you have room for.

Other than that though, a fermenter is a fermenter. Use a solid recipe/kit and follow good practices and the Mr. Beer will put out just as good a batch of beer as any other fermenter.

A co-workers dad has one and besides the small batch size is quite happy with it.

I bought one a few months ago and have only made the standard pale ale kit that was included in the original box, but it came out pretty decent. You do have some room for experimenting with different ingredients when you're heating/mixing the wort, or you can toss a bag of hops into the fermenter to hop it up a little too if you want. But there isn't as much room to experiment as if you did the true, full home brewing process yourself. If you look at the Mr. Beer website, though, you'll find a lot of different options of recipies they offer which customers have created by experimenting within the confines allowable by their setup, and it gave me an idea or two on how to make an amber wheat on my own. I still need to buy the ingredients from them, though. Eventually, I want to branch out into the more sophisticated type of home brewing, but this has been a pretty good, inexpensive start so far.

So, short answer to your question: I have tried it, it does a good job if you're just looking for a simple way to make your own beer. It can also be a stepping stone into more sophisticated home brewing if you like it and want to do more later on, making it a good way to do some trial-brewing wiithout spending a lot of money. There's not as much room for customization/experimentation within your beers, but it is still possible.

Thanks for all of the info! I haven't tried it yet, but am planning on giving it a shot soon (maybe tomorrow). I'm going to see how the provided ingredients turn out and then may hit up the local home brewer's store. I'll be sure to post how it turns out!

Water, Water, Water, Water

Choose your water carefully... filter it well... it will make a HUGE difference in the quality of your brew.