Customising your Fresh Wort Kit

Customising your fresh wort kit

You can tailor your kit in many ways by varying the ingredients or processes. Here are some ideas to get you started!

Water amount

If you prefer a stronger or more sessionable strength than the standard kits, you can dilute with lower or higher amounts of water.

For example, diluting the wort base with 4L of water instead of 5L (our normal recommendation) will give you a stronger final beer. Likewise, diluting with 6L of water instead of 5L would give a less strong final beer.

However, increasing the strength too much may stress the yeast and result in poor quality or incomplete fermentation. Diluting too much can also lead to a thin or watery taste.

As an example, a kit with expected ABV of 5% would change as follows based on adjusting the dilution amount:

• 4.0L = approx. 4.17% ABV
• 4.5L = approx. 4.55% ABV
• 5.0L – our normal recommendation = 5% ABV
• 5.5L – approx. 5.56% ABV
• 6.0L – approx. 6.25% ABV

The actual final ABV may vary depending on how well the yeast ferments with the different amount of dilution.

It’s also worth remembering that the wort bases are already hopped, so changing the dilution amount will also affect the bitterness: less water means higher bitterness and vice versa. You should factor this in when deciding whether to change the recommended dilution amount.

Each kit has its own recommended dilution amount that will give best results for that wort base, yeast, and style, but this is a very easy area where you can tailor your kit to your own tastes.

Water treatment

The water used to make the fresh wort bases has been carefully treated to remove chemicals such as chlorine and the mineral content has been balanced to complement the flavours of the malt and hops. While you can dilute with plain tap water and still make great-tasting beer, you may get even better results by treating your tap water or using bottled water.

Water treatment can seem complex but this could be as simple as using a carbon filter to remove any sediment or hard water flakes from your tap water. You could also use sodium metabisulphite (“campden powder”) to remove chlorine.

Bottled mineral water can be a very good alternative to tap water, especially if your tap water is particularly hard or strong-flavoured. Look for varieties that have low overall levels of minerals and similar levels of “sulphates” and “chlorides”. This will help preserve the originally intended mineral balance in the fresh wort base.

Find out more about treating water for brewing with our videos here, and also check out our BREW WITH US ESSENTIALS blog series.

Yeast and fermentation

The variety of yeast you use really does make a difference to your final beer. If you want to put a twist on your favourite fresh wort kit, try adding a different yeast to the one that normally comes bundled in. This can be a great way to learn just how big a difference the yeast strain can make.

See our full selection of yeast here.

You could also keep the yeast the same and try changes to the fermentation temperature (if you have temperature control for your fermenter), or even try techniques such as fermenting under pressure. Find out more about pressure fermenting with our video here.

Hops

Most of our fresh wort kits come with some secondary hops to add once fermentation is complete. However, you could customise your fresh wort kit by leaving these out, using a different variety, using more hops, or adding the hops at different times – at the start or in the middle of fermentation, etc.

Our fresh wort bases have already had bittering hops added suitable for most styles of beer, as well as whirlpool hops for loads of flavour. However, if you prefer more bitterness in your beer, you could try making a “hop tea” by boiling some of the hops in plain water. Hops are naturally bitter, but the type of bitterness will change as you boil them longer, just like tea changes the longer you leave the bag in.

After boiling, strain the hop tea with muslin to remove the hop sediment and allow to cool to room temperature. Add your cooled hop tea at the beginning, when you dilute the fresh wort base. You should also reduce the amount of water you dilute with to avoid affecting the strength of the beer – for example, if your hop tea is 1L, you should add 4L of clean water.

You can learn more about different hop varieties and how to use them here.

See our full range of hops here.

Steeping malts

You can also make “malt tea” by steeping malt in water. This works very well with crystal malts (which add caramel flavours) and roasted malts (which add dark coffee and chocolate notes).

This is a great way to turn a fresh wort kit into a new beer. For example, you can turn our crisp West Coast style pale ale OIL FOR THE NECK into a black IPA by adding steeped chocolate malt, or turn our English ale DOOMINATOR into an ESB by adding steeped medium crystal malt.

To steep malts, add 500g of malt to 2L of room temperature water and stir gently. Then cover and leave overnight. Strain the mixture with muslin to leave the grain behind so you have just the steeping liquid. Gently heat this liquid in a saucepan to about 65°C and hold there for 5 minutes, then allow to cool back to room temperature.

Add your cooled steeping liquid at the beginning, when you dilute the fresh wort base. As with hop tea, don’t forget to reduce the amount of water you dilute with to avoid over- or under diluting your kit. So you would add 3L of plain water alongside your 2L steeping liquid.

You can learn more about the different types and varieties of malt here.

See our full range of malts here.

Recipe generator

Our fresh wort bases are all available separately as well as in our bundled kits. You can create your own custom kits by choosing your own hops and yeast to add to your choice of wort base!

The simplest way to order a custom kit is to use our Recipe Generator. First choose Malt Extract as the ingredient type, then you’ll find the fresh wort bases under the Wort Concentrate category:

Within the Recipe Generator you can also add hops, yeast, and even extra malts. If you’re unsure how much hops to choose, why not look at one of our existing fresh wort kits for inspiration?

For more information on how to use the Recipe Generator, check out our guide here.