Beer Making

If you have never brewed, start with a kit. A fermenter, a hydrometer, sanitiser and a tin of extract will make twenty-three litres of genuinely good beer, and everything you learn doing it transfers directly to more involved methods later.

If you have brewed a few kits and want a real step up without buying a mash tun, fresh wort is the shortest path. It is unfermented beer, brewed and hopped and sealed sterile — you pitch yeast and package a fortnight later, with none of the extract character that puts people off tinned kits.

All-grain is the last step, not the first. It gives you control over mash temperature and therefore body and fermentability, but it will not rescue a beer fermented too warm. Get temperature control sorted before you spend money on a mashing system.