The Beer Borg

Mr. Beer LBK

It’s kind of funny to hear the different responses you get when you mention Mr. Beer! Many old-school home brewers tend to have a less then favorable view on the “novelty” beer kit. I’ve heard things like “You can’t brew real beer with that.” and “It’s  a waste of time and effort when you only get 2 gallons of beer…”. But there are others that look at these simple beer making kits as a starting point or gateway into an obsession , umm,  eer a hobby, yeah hobby, that’s it!

One local home brew store near me actually sells the Mr Beer kits and refills. When I mentioned it to the store’s owner he said they get a lot of business from people who received a Mr. Beer Kit for Christmas, Father’s Day or a Birthday and were so happy with the results of brewing that first beer that they  come in wanting to know more about homebrewing and want to do more with their brew! Many times these homebrew newbies end up spending several hundred dollars to get a bigger and better brewing set ups and supplies! He estimates that 20 to 25% of his business was because of these new brewers using the Mr Beer kits.

Another local brewing store said they stopped selling Mr. Beer products about 15 years ago, stating that the cost for what you get in a kit that only allows you to brew 2 gallons of beer at a time was too high when you could spend close to the same starting out for a basic

Brewers Best kit that you can brew 5 gallons with and  have a lot more flexibility and creativity with how the beer was crafted. This is true but are you really that limited when using the Little Brown Keg (LBK) that comes with the Mr. Beer Kit? Ok you use the Mr. Beer hopped malt extracts (HME) and their Booster and their yeast and everything else but are you really limited to using only Mr.Beer products in the LBK? I think not!

When I first started brewing it was with the Mr. Beer Kit my wife bought me for Christmas. This seems to be a recurring them with Mr. Beer brewers. They got it as a gift and next thing you know their hooked. As my gift I got the Premium Gold Kit  with the International refill. So right away I had 5 recipes that I could start brewing. The nice thing was that each recipe took me less then a hour to brew!

After my first couple of batches I wanted to try something a little different. I had been frequenting the forums on the Mr Beer website and had learned a lot about hops and malts and adjuncts and other things used to enhance the beer. This really spurred my curiosity and steered me to try other things. I started with adding some Dried Malt Extract (DME) to some of the Mr. Beer recipes along with some orange peel and coriander to  a wheat beer. I then tried boiling some hops to change the flavor and feel of the beer. So the claim of Mr. Beer limiting your creativity just doesn’t hold up.  Actually you could make an arguement for the other way around. The smaller batch size actually allows you to experiment more then you might with a five gallon kit. There are plenty of people that do all kinds of extract and all grain brewing in the LBK and use it to do test batches before doing 5 or 10 gallon batches.

In fact Mr. Beer has actually played a pretty big part in not only the home brewing scene but also in the whole craft beer seen. If it weren’t for Mr. Beer there would be far fewer home brewers and also fewer small micro breweries.

One fledgling brewery,  Blue Wolf Brewery in Minnesota owes it beginning to Mr. Beer since that is what the owner first started brewing with and I think it’s pretty safe to say that Blue Wolf Brewery isn’t the only one to have it start with Mr. Beer in some way.

So when I get some of the  old-school home brewer’s less then favorable comments on these “novelty” beer kits and I hear things like “You can’t brew real beer with that.” and “It’s  a waste of time and effort when you only get 2 gallons of beer.” I just smile, sit back and relax, I don’t worry I just have a home brew because I know better!