If you are looking for a way to make your own beer, but don't want to spend hours and hours doing it, and don't want to mess it up several times before getting it right, then Mr. Beer is for you. I fail to understand why my buddies are so keen on the old fashioned home brew kits (that include a 5 gallon "carboy", lots of hoses, lots of patience and lots of technical abilities), when this one makes really excellent beer for about 10% of the effort. And who really wants to make 44 botles of beer at once"" One kit make 12 20-oz bottles (or 20 12-oz bottles).
I have made dozens of batches of beer from the hundred or so recipes offered by Mr. Beer, and all of them are excellent. There is the occasional batch that I am just a little too careless with my sanitization steps, and these have a bad "off flavor," but this has happened only twice, and the off flavor seems to diminish with time. It is hard for me to drink other beers now (even excellent ones like Guiness and Sam Adams) because my beer is *so much better*!
Making one batch takes less than an hour of work: Disolve the sugar ("Booster") in 4 cups of tap water; boil it; add the mix, the hops and the other stuff you can add (e.g., some recipes call for fruit or honey or molasses or brown sugar); Stir; Add this to the 8-quart "keg" filled with more tap water; Stir; add the yeast and put it in the basement. That's all for step one, and that takes less than an hour. (The all-important sterlization steps are simple and take almost no time--they are scattered through this process.)
Let it sit in the (cool dark) basement for 1 to 3 weeks. Then you bottle it (and you can re-use plastic Coke bottles) with a touch of table sugar. The bottling takes most of an hour, but this is the fun part! Let it sit for 1 to 20 weeks (generally, the longer the better--1 week is not enough for me). That's it!
Your friends who are experienced beer makers will scoff at this kit, but I say that's their problem, not yours. This is an excellent product. The Mr. Beer web site is also very good. The customer support seems to assume you are actively sampling the product (!), so they are *very* friendly!
A tip: Use *tap water*! As it turns out, the dirtier your tap water is, the better the beer. Have you every tried to drink the water in Bavaria? It is *awful*! But it makes great beer. In the US, where the water is clorinated and florinated, boil it and cool it first to get rid of those things. My water in north-central Illinois is quite hard, and my beer is quite good!
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