Pat PilcherSummary
Mangrove Jack’s Craft Series Starter Microbrewery
PAT PILCHER loves a good brew but not the cost and discovers that there is a cheap-skates way to save money and still get a tasty beer.
$370
I got the brewing bug about 10 years ago when an amazing little company called the Occasional Brewer started up in Wellington. Their business model was brilliant. They had all the brewing gear, the ingredients, the brewing experts and recipes for just about any beer you could imagine. All you had to do was decide what you wanted to brew and follow simple instructions. The best part – aside from getting 40L of cheap, super tasty craft beer after fermenting and bottle-conditioning – was that they cleaned up after you.
Sadly, the recession saw the Occasional Brewer close its doors earlier this year, leaving many wondering how to make their own craft beer at home instead of spending the equivalent of the GDP of a developing nation at the bottle store.
Happily, I stumbled upon an amazing New Zealand business that is little known to most Kiwis but a legend amongst the global brewing community: Mangrove Jack’s.
They have a brewing kit designed from the ground up for home brewing that makes crafting your own ales, lagers (and even ciders) an absolute doddle. Best of all (for my inner cheap bastard), the kit is just $370 (or just over 2 dozen 300ml bottles of your favourite craft brew).
The kit consists of a stainless-steel fermenter barrel with a threaded tap on its bottom and all the gear you’ll need to craft your own beer. A batch brewed in the kit will give you a whopping 26L of craft beer, meaning it practically pays for itself after 2-3 brews.
Having previously brewed by boiling malted grains into the wort (beer juice), which was then hopped and fermented, the beers I made at the Occasional Brewer typically took half a day of solid, full-on, hot and exhausting work. Would the Mangrove Jack approach be any simpler? Most importantly, would it deliver a decent, drinkable beer?
Their approach is ingenious. Instead of making you work with several kilos of malted grain, they’ve pre-concentrated it into a syrup stored in a multi-part plastic pouch containing the hops, yeast, instructions and any other additions you’ll need depending on the style of beer you’re brewing. This approach is lighter to work with, but you don’t have to spend an eternity hitting specific temperatures to get the Wort right for fermenting.
Instead, you first sterilise your fermenter (the golden rule of brewing is this: if in doubt, sterilise), squeeze the syrup out of the pouch into the fermenter and add 3 litres of boiling water, stirring until the syrup is dissolved. Next, add a further 20 litres of cold water, wait for the water to cool down to 23c (a handy adhesive temperature indicator strip you stick on the outside of the fermenter tells you at a glance how hot/cold everything is), and add the yeast once the water is cool enough not to kill it. Next, plug an airlock filled with sterilised water into the lid, close the fermenter and leave it for 7 days, adding hops and waiting for another 2 weeks. The total initial brew time was under an hour, and, most crucially, I barely broke a sweat.
A huge range of pouches is available, each offering a different style of beer. Out of perverse curiosity, I settled on a mango IPA. Emptying the malt extract into the fermenter and adding 3 litres of boiling water revealed a rich malty aroma with a hint of mango.
Brewing during cold weather presented me with an additional challenge – the brew needs to be kept at a stable temperature. Any abrupt temperature drops/increases will ruin your brew. Having already had our share of unseasonable cold snaps, I also invested in a heat blanket and temperature controller. The total cost was shy of $150, but given the many beers I anticipated brewing with the kit, it was a really small beer (see what I did there?).
After two weeks the fermenter stopped bubbling, and a quick check with the bundled hydrometer revealed that my beer was ready for bottling. Adding two small lozenge-sized sugar drops (which are bundled with the kit) into each 300ml bottle and then the beer (using the bundled bottling wand which attaches to the threaded tap on the fermenter) took a grand total of 40 minutes, including 33 minutes for a quick hot hygiene bottle wash and rinse in the dishwasher before bottling. Adding sugar means that the leftover yeast in the beer will digest the sugar, farting out carbon dioxide, which dissolves into the beer, making it fizzy.
Three weeks later, the Mango IPA was ready. If you’re a hophead who likes a refreshing IPA, you’ll probably love the amber liquid magic worked by the Mangrove Jack brew kit. With malt notes subtly balanced against a hoppy counterpoint, subtle unripe green mango notes add a clever accent that lingers on the back of the palate, making for a unique IPA that goes great with food.
Given the sheer simplicity of the entire brew process, I must admit that I had low expectations of the finished product. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised at how tasty the IPA I’d crafted was. Suppose you’re looking for a simple, low-fuss way to craft your own delicious beer, saving a bundle of money. In that case, the Mangrove Jacks brew kit is definitely what you’re looking for.
Note: Since writing this review, Occasional Brewer has reopened and is operating out of Brew town in Wellingtons Hutt Valley. Yay.
