Review: Brewbarrel all-in-one homebrew kit

“Dehydrated beer – just add water!” It's a little more complicated than that, but that is pretty much the aim of Brewbarrel, a simple yet innovative homebrew kit from Germany (where it sells as Braufässchen). The innovation is that almost everything takes place in the one vessel – a five-litre minikeg that you also serve the beer from – so there is no need for any cleaning or moving liquids around, and that you can go from kit to drinkable beer in just one week.

Inside the ingredients box

The basic kit contains the keg, a pressure-release bung, instructions, a bottle of malt extract and a little pot of hop extract. This is what brewers call an all-extract kit, meaning there's no need to boil crushed malt and real hops. Real brewers tend to sniff at the lack of flexibility and craft in extract brewing, but it does makes it a lot simpler.

Of course there is also a sachet of yeast – one of the complexities in Brewbarrel's development was finding yeasts that would both work quickly and drop cleanly to the bottom once their work was done. And as well as a choice of golden or dark lagers, wheat beer (Weizen) and pale ale, you can specify additional flavourings, including extra hops. So while I tested a Dunkel with oak chips and honey, a homebrewer friend helped with another Dunkel and an extra-hoppy Weizen.

Fermentation begins

The brew process is simplicity itself. The first job is to get the malt extract into the keg, you then use the malt bottle as a measure for adding hot and cold water. Add the assorted flavourings (the muslin bag of oak chips was a pain to get through the hole, but the rest just pour), the yeast and the bung, and you are pretty much done.

Now you just leave it at room temperature for five days to ferment – or you do, if you don't spot the extra bit in the instructions about inverting the keg for a few moments after the first 24 hours, in order to mix up and revitalise (rouse, in brewer-speak) the yeast. After five days, you put it in the fridge for two more days, this stops fermentation and helps the yeast settle to the bottom.

Sadly, I missed the 24-hour step with my honey-oak Dunkel, so despite a lively initial fermentation, the result after chilling was a fairly weak and sweet malt drink. Fortunately, rousing the yeast and refermenting for another five days or so seemed to do the trick, producing a very lively red-brown beer, malty and a bit sweet, not especially strong and with a dry grassy and faintly herbal bitter finish. I found the honey a bit too much, but some other tasters liked it a lot.

Just a tad lively!

My friend's brews worked well – fermenting the wheat beer at a lower temperature also seemed to bring out extra banana notes. None of the beers was particularly full-bodied or bitter, even with the extra hops, but his were eminently drinkable in a week. With mine, I found that an extra week in the keg after tapping the first couple of pints improved the Dunkel – to my taste, at least. A slight dustiness moderated the sweetness, and allowed notes of dark dried fruit to play with the honey overtones.

In conclusion, Brewbarrel is an easy to use kit that produces decent beer, as long as you can follow instructions of course! 😞 It is a little pricey, with the basic £25 kit equating to around £3 a pint, and the beers are not going to frighten the horses, but it would make a fun gift and a good introduction for a potential homebrewer. It could also be a useful procrastination breaker for anyone suffering from "homebrewer's block" or a dispiriting run of bad brews.

A week around Bamberg #6: When is a Vollbier actually a Dunkel?

Part of the problem is terminology. In German, Vollbier ("full beer") is the taxation class for regular beers of around 3.5%-5.5%, but because for many breweries their Vollbier is an Export Helles or somesuch, some foreigners have assumed that Vollbier=Helles.

Yet here's Brauerei Penning-Zeissler producing a brown Vollbier – the photo here is its tasty Hetzelsdorfer Fränkisches Vollbier dunkel. Simply, it is the brewery's "regular beer". (John Conen, author of the beer tourist's bible Bamberg and Franconia, noted the same thing - that in Franconia, Vollbier is typically darkish red-gold and relatively hoppy.)

Similarly, Dunkel just means dark. Ask for a draught Dunkel at Mahrs Bräu brewery tap, as I did, and you'll get not their ETA Hoffmann, which is more of a Munich Dunkel, but their Ungespundet. It's light brown but it's darker than Mahrs Hell or Weiss.

Equally, Helles/Hell merely means pale and is not automatically a synonym for Dortmunder Export or Bavarian Helles. For many breweries, it is simply the one of their two regular beers that is not Dunkel. If you want to refer to a beer style, you probably need to add that extra qualifier.

Oh, and Landbier isn't a specific style either - sorry, Ratebeer! It means country beer and is often applied more as a marketing term, like "traditional" or "craft" in English. Many Landbiers are maltier than most lagers and may be in the same traditional mould as a Franconian Braunbier, but others are golden Pilseners. Confusing, eh? (-:

A week around Bamberg #3: Hot cats and cool beers

It's tiring work, basking in the sun

A trip to the excellent Wildpark Hundshaupten in the Fränkische Schweiz (“Franconian Mountains”) – all sorts of mostly European animals, such as rare sheep, deer, wolves and lynx – was also a chance to visit a couple of small towns with their pubs and brewpubs.

The first was Gasthof Redengörg in Ebermannstadt, where we found a really good example of a traditional Franconian Braunbier, Hetzelsdorfer Fränkisches Vollbier dunkel. Dark copper coloured and much more like a country bitter than a Munich Dunkel, it was from Brauerei Penning-Zeissler a few miles down the road – in fact we'd passed the brewery going to the Wildpark.

The upper & lower keeps

After that, it was on to Pottenstein to see the castle, Burg Pottenstein. More than 1000 years old, this sits on top of an impressive crag and has withstood a number of sieges. Most of the medieval fortifications have gone though, demolished in the early 1800s as far as I could tell. The remainder is basically a tower house, so it wasn't quite as exciting as Roric was hoping, although he did like some of the weapons collection in the castle museum...

Pottenstein, from the burg

In the town beneath the castle there were three or more breweries or brewpubs not long ago, now there are two. Sadly we missed Brauerei Mager, but enjoyed lunch in the Gasthausbrauerei Hufeisen. Its Kellerweizen was unimpressive, but its Bio-Dunkel (bio=organic) was much better.

Better still were the local cherries, bought from a stall at the side of the road where it ran through the cherry orchards. Rich, dark and sweet, and just €3.50 a kilo!

Just for a change, an update with no pictures of beer...

Saxon beer

So here's today's shopping - Saxon beer. Lots of Dunkel-y goodness, I hope...

I picked up this lot from one of the stalls at today's beer festival just outside Hamburg, Bier aus dem Norden. More about that later, once I've had some sleep, done a bit of work, and got my head back in gear.

Fuller's Frontier keg lager

Fuller's is dipping its toes back into the lager pond, with the launch of a new keg beer called Frontier. Described by head brewer John Keeling on Twitter as "a new wave lager", Frontier is already available in the Mawsons Arms next to the brewery in Chiswick. It is going into 50 pubs to test consumer reaction, he added.

The Frontier launch is being supported by London-based marketing specialist Boutique Beer Brands which also represent the likes of Timmermanns and Blanche de Namur, presumably to help Fuller's reach out to a new market segment.

It's not the first time Fuller's has brewed a lager of course – in the early 1980s it produced one called K2. This didn't last all that long but you can still see K2 Lager memorabilia in the Hock Cellar at the brewery (left).

And more recently some of its ales have been actively targeted at lager drinkers, most notably Discovery and Honey Dew – Discovery was subsequently switched from a normal cellar temperature ale to being served only chilled, at 8-10C.

When the Fuller's Fine Ale club asked members last year whether the brewery should produce a lager, the responses were divided. Some said it would be an unnecessary distraction, others pointed out that British breweries – most notably Harviestoun, with Schiehallion – already made good cask or craft lagers, so why not?

And of course since then we've been the continued rise of craft beer, including some very fine London lagers from the likes of Camden Town Brewery and Meantime, so it is not too surprising that Fuller's might decide to join in.

Indeed, given its interest in historical beers for its Past Masters range and the fact that lagers have been brewed in London for well over a century (and elsewhere in Britain for even longer), perhaps a Past Masters-style dark Munich lager is in order.

Being out of the country for a while longer, I won't be able to taste Frontier any time soon, but if you get the chance, please do let me know what you think!

A grand day to be indoors with craft beer

The location for the second Craft Beer Day – an old limestone factory converted into an arts centre, on the icy and windswept shore of a lake in a distant suburb of Hamburg – seemed unpromising to me. Yet by the end of last Saturday, around 2500 people had made their way there to enjoy a fine variety of good beer, plus good food and music, and of course good company.

Grönwohlder and Zeugenbräu

Around a dozen breweries took part, I think all were northern German except two: Schneider Weisse from Bavaria, and Black Isle from Scotland. (The local newspaper coverage of the latter was amusing – the writer seemed amazed that "the land of whisky" should also produce beer.) The northerners ranged in size from Stralsund's Störtebeker – formerly the Stralsunder Brewery – which is now up to 100,000hl a year, according to brewer Christoph Puttnies, to hobby-brewers turned professional (or semi-pro) such as Grönwohlder, Sommerbecker and Zeugenbräu, the latter producing just 50 litres at a time.

The one thing they almost all shared, apart from not being factory brewers, was an interest in challenging the conservative monoculture of mainstream German beer – the popular assumption that Beer=Pils/Helles, and is more for quaffing than tasting. I was particularly amused when Grönwohlder boss Torsten Schumacher said no to visitors asking for Pils, telling them he was presenting only his Dunkel and Landbier on draught. He told me afterwards that he makes Pils mostly for the supermarkets – he said his other beers are unfiltered and don't have the required shelf-life.

I suspect that people coming to a craft beer festival and looking for Pils shows that the German craft beer movement is sending out mixed messages. On the one hand, there are people pushing the historical, experimental and creative sides of brewing, while on the other are people using the term simply to mean local and non-industrial production of Pils and Weizen. Can the two co-exist? I guess we have to hope so, and that the latter will gradually shift towards the former.

Ratsherrn and Ricklinger, getting busy

There were certainly signs of this happening among the breweries present at Craft Beer Day. Most had a had a variety of flavoursome beers on offer, including an excellent Stout and a rather nice Rauchbier from Finsterwalder, a classic Winterbock from Klüver's, and a tasty Porter from Privatbrauerei Bosch. Ricklinger, who I met at the first Craft Beer Day, was also there with a great range of beers. Most brewers had Dunkels and several had a Porter or Stout as well – I had a chat too with Christoph about the similarities between Baltic Stout and his excellent Störtebeker Stark-bier, which is technically a Doppelbock.

As well as all the good beer, it was wonderful to meet and talk with some really creative German brewers. Perhaps the most experimental is Zeugenbräu's Boris Georgiev – his proud motto is "Guaranteed not brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot", as he creates new twists on ancient North German spiced and fruit beer traditions such as beer with mango or spiced with cardamom.

I also had a great chat with one of the event's organisers, Axel Ohm of Ratsherrn Brauerei. I have to confess I wasn't too impressed with Ratsherrn when it started out – it seemed to be taking a very cautious let's-not-frighten-the-horses approach, with a beer range led by yet another Pils and a decent but not inspired Pale Ale. More recently though it has struck out a bit, with Iggy Hop, which is a single-hopped Weizen using American Simcoe hops, and now a crisp Zwickel too. Axel confirmed that there has indeed been a policy shift, with the realisation that there really is a market for something a bit different. We also talked about how different it is compared to the south of Germany, where the dead hand of tradition is so cold and heavy that breweries are almost scared to innovate.

Readying the bierstacheln

 One final highlight was discovering another tradition on the Schneider Weiss bar: mulled weissbier – or more accurately, mulled weizenbock. Beer sommelier Timo Hinkel took a special red-hot poker called a bierstacheln, or beer-sting, and plunged it into a glass of Unser Aventinus; instantly the beer began to foam as heat shock threw CO2 out of the liquid, along with an aroma of toasted caramel.

and mulling the beer

The resulting drink was fascinating – perhaps the oddest part was feeling the still-cold upper foam on my lip while drinking warm beer from below, with flavours of toasted bread and burnt caramel. I know ale was mulled with red-hot pokers in medieval England too, but sad to say I've never tasted that version, so this was a new experience – and one I'd like to thank Timo and the Schneider team for.

What does Winter Beer mean to you?

Winter and Weihnachtsbiers, part two: When you think of Christmas and beer, what comes to mind – something rich and dark, or something golden and perhaps even a bit flowery?

When last I looked at German Weihnachtbiers and Winterbocks, they were definitely in the former camp, but to my surprise there are other brewers who fall into the latter. One such is Kulmbacher Mönchshof, which is part of the German Brau Holding International group. Its standard beers – Pils, Bayerisch Hell – are well-made but fairly typical; where it redeems itself for me is with its excellent Kellerbier, an amber-coloured brew resembling a lagered bitter ale.

So when I found Mönchshof Weihnachts Bier, I didn't expect it it would turn out to be a golden Märzen, especially when there's already a Mönchshof Festbier to fill that slot. Sure, as Märzens go it is rather nice – lightly hoppy and peachy, with some underlying spice notes – but it doesn't say Weihnacht to me...

Mönchshof is not alone in this. Carlsberg is touting the bizarre concept of a Tuborg Weihnachts Pilsener (I'd like to try a bottle, having seen from Ratebeer that it's not a Pilsener but a Vienna, but so far I've only seen it on sale in six-packs) and then there's Oettinger's Winterbier, which is very nice with pleasing green hop and toffee-nutty notes, but is more of an amber lager – perhaps even another Festbier, given its 5.6% strength.

Incidentally, quite a few people are snarky about Oettinger because it sells its beer so cheaply – typically €0.50 (40p) for a half-litre – and operates big industrial breweries, all of which has made it the largest beer producer in Germany. On the other hand, it is still locally owned and operates a very efficient single-tier business – it is famous for not advertising and for cutting out the distribution channel.

Anyway, it has not one but two seasonals, the other being a Bock. Weighing in at 6.7%, Oettinger Bock is dark amber with a malty and slightly raisiny nose, and a nice balance of grainy sweetness, bitterness and roasty malt. Yup, that'll do nicely for a cold winter evening. 

Also nice stuff, though at twice the price, is Altenmünster Winterbier Dunkel. Packaged in Altenmünster's trademark decoratively-moulded 500ml flip-top bottles, it balances the typical toffee-ish Dunkel flavours with the spicy hoppy bitterness that's familiar from the various (and somewhat samey) Altenmünster blonds.

And in any case, Oettinger beer is cheap but not the cheapest. The discount supermarket chains all sell six-packs of beer in plastic screw-top 500ml bottles, often priced at just €1.50 a pack, or 50 cents a litre. It's so cheap that the 25 cent deposit per plastic bottle doubles the cost of your purchase...

By the by, the German word that these shops use a lot is "billig", which seems to have more of a sense of "inexpensive" than "cheap". And while no-one wants to be thought of as cheap, everyone loves a bargain. That means everyone shops at Aldi, Lidl, Penny and the others, albeit sometimes in addition to one of the more up-market chains.

Anyway (again), usually it's just the normal boring German choice of Pils or Weizen, but our local Penny Markt now also has Adelskronen Winterbier, at €1.99 for six plastic bottles. This is a winter Dunkel brewed specially for Penny by Fankfurter Brauhaus – that's Frankfurt an der Oder by the way, right on the (modern) Polish border, not the better known financial centre down south – and it is rather good. It's a proper roasty Dunkel, with nutty plummy hints and a dryish body.

Both are certainly better than Carlsberg's other seasonal attempt, which is Holsten Stark. The best thing about this 7% Dunkel Doppelbock is the cool can design, which takes the usual Holsten horseman logo and recasts it in black, silver and gunmetal-grey. The dominant flavour is burnt sugar, there's a bit of roastiness, and the alcohol cuts the sweetness a bit, but overall it is not terribly good.

Last but not least, and showing that the multinationals – in this case AB-Inbev – can produce something decent, is Hasseröder Fürstenbräu Granat, or Princely-brew Garnet. Claimed to be in the style of an 1899 Royal Festbier, which means it'd be based on an amber Vienna lager, rather than the Johnny-come-lately golden Pilsner-alike versions, it's roasty and quaffable, with hints of toast and marmalade.

I'm sure there more: I'll keep looking, and drinking! In the meantime, what's the best winter beer – German or otherwise – that you've had so far this season?