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[Review] Brupaks Mashkit London Bitter

Started by LordEoin, December 03, 2013, 12:42:01 AM

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LordEoin

We don't have an all-grain section, and techincally this IS a kit, so I'll put it here :)

This is a review of the Brupaks Mashkit London Bitter, allgrain kit.
It can be bought from here with the whole range at http://www.homebrewwest.ie/brupaks-mashkits-with-pre-crushed-grain-292-c.asp

At a price of between €19.95 to €25.95, and containing all ingredients, I think these kits are great value.
This one is the cheapest at €19.95

Included in this kit is 3.8kg grain, a 6g sachet of yeast and 72grams of hops.
The grain is packed in its own sealed bag, the hops are vacuum packed and the yeast is on the usual sachet. The whole lot is then packaged in another sealed bag.


The instructions are clear and direct and give you information on:
  • Overview
  • Mashing (single, two and three temperature infusions)
  • Boiling
  • Fermentation

    The grains are all preselected and crushed, so all you need to do is get the strike water right, add your grain, mash and sparge.
    I made a bit of a love pump-up here and took a gravity reading off the top of the wort without stirring it and got a low gravity reading. I added a can of LME to correct this, but calculations later on showed that it would have been 1.038OG at 22liters.

    Once you've got your wort ready to boil, the instructions say to add ALL of the hops for a 60 to 90 minute boil.
    This is the only point where I can fault these kits. Because it's a pre-selected combination of anonymous hops, you don't know the varieties or harvests.
    It takes a small leap of faith to put the whole hop bill in for the full boil time, so I split it into 2/3@60mins and the remaining 1/3 split @20mins and @5mins to try to get some more flavour and aroma.

    it was fermented at 18C for about 10 days and then moved to secondary conditioning in the fridge for about another 10 days.

    It has been in the bottle for about a month now, and although it's a bit young i've 'sampled' a few over the past few days.
    Because I added in the LME its a bit stronger than intended and will benefit from anothe few months of conditioning.
    It's a nice beer, full bodied with a nice bittering. I think that holding some of the hops for later boils was a good idea.
    It could probably do with a bit of dryhopping, but it's still a great drop.

    I suppose I'll have to open another one now, purely for scientific and reporting purposes...  ;D

    Overall, my final verdict is this:
    Its a fair price for a great product.
    All of the recipe design is done for you and you use everything provided, so there's no waste or unnecessary spending.
    The predicted gravity is on the ball.
    Instructions are very informative.
    The beer tastes great.
    The only down-side is that the hops are a mystery. But just hold some back for later in the boil and everything's good :)
    I was so impressed by this mashkit that I bought another.

    Here is a view of the final beer, It's a lovely copper colour with a light head:





Garry

I got a bottle of this off Eoin tonight at JRM's East Cork splinter group meeting.

It's a fine drop alright. Nice clear copper colour. There was a mighty head on the bottle I got, much better than the picture Eoin posted above, in front of the stripey thing. Nicely carbonated too.

Not much hop aroma but you could definitely get the malt. Good body and a nice bitter finish. It's malty and a bit spicy. There's a bit of an alcohol burn but I'd say this would mellow over time. He did add an extra tin of LME after all  :P

Overall, I like it  O0 Will it move LordKit over to the AG side???

LordEoin

Glad you liked it. It could do with a few months in the bottle.
I'll try your extract version tomorrow or the day after.
AG takes a bit too long for me, but I'm sure I'll do a few occasionally ;)

LordEoin

Scored 32 in the competition, accidentally hacked to an Extra Special Bitter