Review: Get’er Brewed Porter Extract Kit

16th March 2015 pob

This is the Porter extract kit from Get’er Brewed.

“A dark beer that perhaps doesn’t get the respect it deserves nowadays. A strong malty flavour with some roast characteristics and lovely chocolate malt notes.

Nutty slightly roasty and a hint of chocolate its hard to resist”

2 cans of Muntons Maris Otter Light extract (Best Before June 2016)
2 sealed hop bags for 10 and 60 minutes additions
A bag of various crushed steeping grains (1kg Weyermann Grains, according to the instructions)
1 whirfloc tab
1 muslin bag
1 sachet of Gervin GV12 Ale yeast (Best Before March 2016)
A page with instructions

I brewed this kit on the 14th January and tried to keep to the instructions as best I could. They said that the kit is based on a 26 litre boil with 23 litres of wort produced.

I had to use my own initiative as the instructions didn’t explain the amount of water in which I had to steep the speciality grains. I put the grains in the muslin bag provided, into 5 litres of water at 71°C degrees and a half hour later I had my wort. The temperature varied between 71°C degrees (strike temperature) and 65°C degrees over the 30 minutes.

I added the wort, two cans of extract and water to the boiler and brought to the boil. I made the mistake here, in not having indications of the water levels in my boiler, so I believe that I entered less than the 26 litres on the instructions. Even so, I brought the wort to the boil and added my first hops at 60 minutes. I was surprised that the sealed hop bag actually had two tea hop bags of pellets – one 19 gram and one of 18 grams. There was no indication of what hops these were although the website says Fuggles.

I put my wort chiller in the boil with 15 minutes left to go.

The next and last addition was at 10 minutes, so I added the hop tea bag and the whirlfoc tablet to the boil.

At the end of the hour boil, the elements were turned off and the tap was turned on to chill the wort to 20°C as per the instructions. I overshot the 20°C and got the wort down to 18.4°C. The cold night helped with getting the wort cooled quickly. I made a mistake here by whirlpooling the wort against the chiller direction with my plastic paddle, forgetting about the hop teabags. These disintegrated into nothing with my stupidity and the pellets were left to roam the wort.

I transferred 19.5 litres to my fermenter and took a gravity reading. The instructions recommended an opening gravity of between 1.040 and 1.052. I got an Original Gravity of 1.042 which is on the lower end. I pitched the yeast and put the fermenter aside under a blanket and duvet.

The yeast took a bit to get going but fermented away nicely over two and a half weeks. My Final Gravity ended up at 1.014, with the recommended range of between 1.008 to 1.014. I bottled on the 2nd February (19 days later) and I batch primed with 105 grams of glucose. I squeezed 41 bottles from the 19.5 litres I had. I got the hop pellets out with a newly made hop stopper out of an Ikea splash guard rolled up, when batch priming.

I have to say this is a lovely porter that was easy to drink. This came out at 3.7% and is a lovely dark brown colour, with a light chocolate and caramel taste, and subtle hops. It went down a treat at the Louth Brewers meeting.

The kit is well worth the value, especially with the ingredients included. The only problems I had with the kit were that the instructions could be better.

The instructions are very basic in comparison to the Northern Brewer one. They explain about the ingredients, SIT (sterilisation, information and temperature) and there are seven points which describe the process. They talk about making a starter for the yeast but don’t explain how to do it, which wouldn’t be great for somebody’s first extract kit.

There were vague areas that only for I knew from doing a kit before, I was able to get through the process. Things like the initial water amount for steeping grains, length of the boil, when is the right time to bottle and carbonation of the beer. If the instructions were better or maybe a video on the website that people can refer to, this kit would be suitable for the homebrewer who wanted to upgrade to extract kits.

Overall: I recommend this kit.

Credits: Thanks to Get’er Brewed for suppling the Get’er Brewed Extract Porter kit.

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Author: itsclinto