How long

[mashani]

Jim a problem with the coopers is the fact you need to add sugar to their recipe. With most of the HME's full of POR they have the same MR B twang

Yep, I highly recommend Muntons Gold kits if you want to go that route. They come as 2 3.3# cans of extract, each can will make 2.5 gallons of good beer without any adjuncts needed or weird POR twang. They just use good English hops, and the beers are all solid. Even better are the Woodforde kits they manufacture, but I'm not sure you can get those in the states anymore.

I use those sometimes for easy mode batches to fill the pipeline when I'm too busy to brew.

Just make sure they are the GOLD kits.

[jimjohson]

i do not buy hmes or no boil kits, as (at least in my lhbs) they cost more than just buying dme, hops, a little carapils, and yeast. not that they taste bad the manager brews the kits all the time and i have tried them, they're good beers. except for the coopers i mentioned before they don't sell hme kits. their no boil kit comes with a big bag of liquid. here, http://www.store.homebrew4less.com/Brew ... ducts/310/ these are them. like i said not bad beer, just pricey and i'm cost driven. they also sell another kit it's a boil, i can't remember the name. includes, dme, lme hops sometimes several ozs, yeast, & even grain in some. he says is put together at his supply store. can be a little more reasonable at $30-$50 dollars a box depending on style. but i can still beat their price for most(not all) their brews just buying the components.

[RickBeer]

Coopers didn't buy Mr. Beer to shut it down. If they had, they would have shut it down right away. Instead, what you're seeing is at least on the technical side gross incompetence, and on the Marketing side they're beyond their capabilities.

Coopers has no idea how to run an ecommerce business. Their site is here and has always been lousy. I'd also say that pre-Coopers Mr. Beer wasn't exactly chock full of ecommerce experts. They found a niche and hit it good, but the site and marketing pretty much are poor. Do the math on how much they Mr. Beer would make on an ecommerce sale vs. a retail sale - retail gives them much lower margins, but nice volume IF the product is prominently displayed. If they sell a refill kit (2 cans) for $10 to BedBath, but online it's $16 or more per can...