Mr. Beer Premium Edition Home Microbrewery System

by Mr. Beer

Product Features

• Easy to brew, just add water
• Premium beer at a fraction of the cost
• Drink you own home brew in as little as 14 days
• Re-usable kit for continued brewing
• Makes an excellent gift

Product Details

Product Manual [104kb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 19 x 14 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• Shipping Advisory: This item must be shipped separately from other items in your order. Additional shipping charges will not apply.
• ASIN: B00007G2IX
• Item model number: 20028.00
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,730 in Kitchen & Dining (See Top 100 in Kitchen & Dining)
  • #5 in Kitchen & Dining > Home Brewing & Wine Making > Beer Brewing

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

In just 14 days, beginning and advanced brewers alike can enjoy a glass of premium, handcrafted beer with this home-brewing kit. The 2-1/2-gallon brew keg features a pour tap and wide-mouthed lid for easy cleaning by hand. Included with this microbrewery kit are a can of West Coast Pale Ale mix, which produces a mild, full-bodied beer, a single-use packet of booster, which contains all-natural carbohydrates that enhance flavor and boost alcohol content, and brewer’s yeast. The beer-making ingredients are simply mixed with water, left to brew in the keg at room temperature for a week, and then put into the kit’s eight one-liter PET bottles for another week, during which time natural carbonation takes place. No CO2 cartridges are needed to enhance sparkle or beer head. Plastic bottle caps and labels are also included, as well as an instruction booklet full of brewing tips and recipes. Other Mr. Beer mixes and booster packs can be ordered separately. The keg is made of FDA-compliant PVC, which does not impart taste or color and is virtually indestructible. --Ann Bieri

Product Description

Make your own premium beer at a fraction of the cost of store bought beer. Brew your own beer in 14 days (7 days to ferment and 7 days to carbonate), simple, fun, and inexpensive. Makes a case of premium beer. Includes a Mr. Beer Brew Keg with lid, 8-1 liter PET bottles, West Coast Pale Ale beer mix, Booster Pack for flavor enhancement and alcohol boost, One-Step Cleanser to clean and disinfect brewing and bottling equipment, Mr. Beer Brewer's Guide inclusive of brewing tips, recipes, and the most frequently asked questions to get the most out of your Mr. Beer brewing system. Simple 4-step instructions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

257 of 262 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good introduction to home brewing..., September 1, 2007

By 

Otto "Otto" (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Beer Premium Edition Home Microbrewery System (Kitchen)

I received the Mr. Beer kit for Xmas, and it's a good system overall. It serves as a very good introduction to home brewing, but it does have some downsides as well.

Good bits:
-The system is about as easy as it could be.
-The instructions are clear and simple.
-The fermenting tank is small (2 gallons), meaning that you don't have to wait around for a long time to taste the final product. With your more normal 5 gallon kits, you have to bottle a LOT of beer, and wait a bit longer for fermentation.
-There's dozens of mixes available on their homepage, and they offer a lot of quality products at reasonable prices. Join their club to avoid the expensive shipping charges.

Not so good bits:
-The fermenter is almost too simple. A proper airlock design would make it more foolproof as to tell when fermenting is complete, as well as avoiding contamination of the beer.
-The included mixes, while of good quality, produce a rather poor beer by comparison to what it is possible to make with the kit. Their website has a lot better product than what they include in the kit, and this gives some people bad impressions of the kit itself. The fault is not with the kit, but with the very basic starter beer in the package. The separate mixes they sell in stores are not much better, being all very basic brews. They're not bad, but they're not great either. Mediocre at best.
-Sterilization (which is possibly the most important part of home brewing) is difficult because the fermenter is not dishwasher safe. A higher quality plastic that could stand high temperatures would be a better overall choice for the fermenting keg, since automatic dishwashers are a great way to sterilize your equipment easily.

My suggestions on how to use this kit correctly:
-Go to their website and pick up some of the more advanced receipes instead of using the mixes as given initially. If you've used those included mixes, don't be disappointed overall, it's that the mixes are very basic. Using the better receipes and the better ingredients, you can make quite incredible brews.
-Keep the fermenter in an enclosed dark space during the fermenting process. I recommend a large cooler. This avoids contamination of the product as well as keeping it at a steady temparature.
-Be very, very careful to sterilize completely. The OneStep cleanser they include is very good, but you do have to use it properly. Read the instructions and be sure that everything gets cleaned extremely well.
-No matter what the instructions say, bottle conditioning takes longer than a week. Really. Wait 2 weeks, preferably 4, before you crack the first bottle. The beer only gets better the longer you let it mature in the bottles.
-Go easy on the sugar. Too much sugar in the bottles and they will explode, or taste like cider.

If you use the kit as intended and with a careful eye for cleanliness, then you can produce some excellent quality brews in a very short time. But follow those instructions precisely. Anything less will result in poor quality brews.

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After using it for over a year, I have some more things to add:

- DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN THE LID. The lid must allow the gases produced MUST escape. This is especially true with their higher alcohol mixes and stouts. If you overtighten, the end result will be spilled beer and a ruined keg. I brewed a dopplebock using the keg, and overtightened it. Result: The keg overpressurized and almost burst. Some foam came out of the top of the keg, and spilled into my cooler. The residue, once it dried, provided food for.. well.. not so nice creatures. The keg was naturally unusable afterwards. However, this was my own fault, and a new keg only cost me $10 through the Mr. Beer website, so it was not a total loss. And the beer (since it was not contaminated due to the pressure differential, I bottled it anyway) turned out to be absolutely spectacular. So whatever you do, don't tighten it too much. A little hand pressure for tightening is enough.

- Again, go easy on the sugar when bottling! Somebody told me that they had one of the plastic bottles burst on them and the remainder tasted like cider. This is the result of excessive sugar in the bottling process. I highly recommend you get the sugar measure that they sell, if you are bottling in the 12oz, 22oz, or 1 liter sizes. The sugar measure is very easy to use and exact in nature. Takes out the measurements and guesswork.

- Finally, I do not recommend normal bottles with a capper. These are difficult to use and contrary to popular belief, do not produce better beer. The screw top bottles are simplest because they hold the pressure in properly and are trivially simple to use. Alternatively, Mr. Beer sells 16 oz "Grolsch style" bottles on their site, which are the rubber grommeted wired cappers, and they work very well. If you must bottle with glass, get those. Or go find similarly capped bottles of beer and use those bottles (after dishwashing, of course). Glass is much easier to sterilize because it's disahwasher safe. Just take the rubber caps off first.

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gotta Agree with the Others, September 3, 2006

By 

Lemuel Bannen "Someday Author" (Norwalk, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Beer Premium Edition Home Microbrewery System (Kitchen)

Okay, so this cuts a bunch of corners from traditional beer brewing. That's the appeal! This makes home brewing so easy, that if true home brewers didn't turn their noses up, something would be wrong.

I'm a busy guy with two kids and a self-owned business. There's little time in my life for hobbies. Having a kit like this allows me to brew beer at home with only about 1/2 hour per session committed.

The fun part is that the ingredients are so varied that you can literally mix and match with endless combinations of flavors, bodies, alcohol contents, etc. It's not a true "just add water" system as I've heard suggested. If it were, the fun would be gone. You do have to put together a recipe (many of which are available online to get you started) and go for it.

Beer brewing for the time impaired person with other responsibilities. It's lot's of fun and the beer is darned good too.

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Makes an awesome brew, June 11, 2008

By 

P-Town Cracker (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Beer Premium Edition Home Microbrewery System (Kitchen)

So finally getting around to reviewing this thing. A quick rundown: Mr. Beer is basically a stripped down method of home brewing. While "real" home brewing is not brain surgery by any means, Mr Beer takes a lot of the legwork and time out of the equation. There is no boiling or steeping needed, no need to prepare airlocks, no need to rack the beer to a secondary fermenter, etc. Its extremely "dumbed down", for lack of a better term. But don't let that deter you!

The MAIN thing to first timers: Do NOT judge this kit by the initial creation!!!!!! I cannot stress this enough! The kit will come with a can of hopped malt extract, usually the West Coast Pale Ale or the Canadian Draft and a package of "Booster", which is basically corn sugar. These base ingredients, when used properly, will provide a PASSABLE beer. But honestly, it's just a way for you to learn how to do it. A bottle of budweiser will likely taste much better. If you persevere, go to the Mr. Beer website and order some of the other (and better) ingredients. Instead of using the booster, its highly recommended to go with a Unhopped Malt Extract. Used in conjunction with one of the hopped cans, these all malt recipes can make some EXCELLENT beers. MUCH better than what is commonly available on the store shelves. You can even get creative and add some of your own touches, such as coriander, cinnamon, orange peel, etc. Also using finishing hops is a great way to add some good aroma and flavor to the final product. I recently brewed up an Octoberfest that blew my friends away. They thought that I had used my "real" homebrewing rig to make it, so I strung them along for a while and finally told them it came from Mr Beer. A real beer kit is excellent and something Mr Beer users may want to graduate to, but I can tell you that this kit here brews some beer on par and sometimes exceeding what I have done with the real deal, and I have made some killer brews the "real" way.

All said, this is a great product. It does suffer some design flaws, such as the lack of a traditional airlock and limited capacity. Making brews with a high amount of fermentables, such as any fruit ale recipes, can be a pain as the notched vents can become clogged during the initial stage. I had a close call where the plastic keg swelled almost to the point of explosion. The woman would have loved that! Also, there is a certain joy to "real" brewing that is missing with Mr. Beer, such as doing a long boil of the wort with different hop varieties. With this kit, its just boiling the water and then removing the heat to add the premixed malts. Simple, makes a unbelievable beer at times, but some of the "fun" is sacrificed. As with all brewing, SANITATION is key! And good water. This is a great buy and I highly recommend this kit to any beer lover. Easy and can put just about any store bought beer to shame.