[Closed] Recommend me a homebrew starter kit....

I'd find the local home brew shop and get in there.

APF

wot 'e said.

Place in stockport on the A6 (near the blossoms) is good.

Homebrew west is good too (irish, think they deliver to UK).

You need bottles - I save my german wheat beer ones.
A decent capper is brilliant (cheap ones are fiddly), as is a bottle drainer.
Oh, when you have poured you homebrew, always wash the bottle out to get rid of sediment, makes it much easier to sanitise for the next batch.
The basic homebrew kits are very basic, I prefer a brewing vessel (BV) with a tap at the bottom, try to get a 30L one so that any mental heads (Krausen) you get from brewing the belgium stuff doesn't explode out the air lock.
A bottling wand works well with the tap for filling bottles quickly.
A thermometer and hygdrometer are worth it too.
carbonation drops are v handy for a beginner.

Clean, clean and clean again - then sanitise. Everything.

Massive Brewery.

Everything you need in a box.

I asked this a while back. Conclusion was:

Massive Brewery (although they were unavailable at the time, hence me asking for alternatives)

Peterfile of this here parish put together [url= http://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/brewers-of-stw/page/13#post-6237441 ]this kit list[/url].

Or there's a similar kit [url= http://www.geterbrewed.com/basic-biab-starter-kit-kit-brewers-upgrade/ ]here from Geterbrewed[/url].

Don't be tempted by the 'simpler' kits which use liquid extract in a can. While you can achieve good results with them, you have way more control and options with the brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) method. It's dead easy too. Looks a bit intimidating/complicated, but it really isn't. There are loads of BIAB brew-day walkthroughs on youtube which will answer pretty much any question you have (plus the brewers of STW 🙂 )

Thanks all.. that massive brewery kit looks perfect

Will, Steve stopped for a while as he was too busy with other stuff, but is back making the kits again now.

My only concern about the massive brewery is its not actually very big.. Is that a good or bad thing??

Good as a starter, and or a tester for later recipes, in that if it goes wrong, you haven't wasted too much!

My only concern about the massive brewery is its not actually very big.. Is that a good or bad thing??

Good, I'm building a 5 gallon HERMS but will probably run around 2-3 gallon to the fermenter, the trouble with 5 galons is it's actually quite a lot of beer to drink when the hobby is supposedly in the brewing.

The Americans do seem to like their 10 gallon batches though. I suspect because outside the 'craft beer' scenes hubs there's probably little or no access to real beer, especially as a lot of states still have monopolies for liquor stores so you drink whatever the state buys.

The only time I think I'd want bigger is for stout, barley wine or lager when you want to do a batch and leave it for 6-18 months, so a big boil/primary, then secondary/condition in smaller kegs (chocolate stout, espresso stout, variety of dry hopped barley wines etc) compared to a session IPA which you want to drink ASAP and it's past it's best in a couple of months.

I used brew uk online and bought their starter Woodford Kit (the kit with everything in it for your first brew), they swopped the normal kit for woodford's Admirals Reserve and it was great. Since then I think we've made almost all of their recipe packs, currently waiting to bottle Bateman's Victory Ale at the weekend.
We bottle all our brews now as keeping it in keg led to my other half drinking everynight "to make sure it didn't go off"!

We bottle all our brews now as keeping it in keg led to my other half drinking everynight "to make sure it didn't go off"!