Coopers Lager beer kit review - any good?

If you were forced on threat of being made to drink warm parsnip wine* to name one beer brewing kit brand, I think that Coopers would probably be the first one to come to many brewers minds. 

Even non-brewers will probably have heard of Coopers as the kit that their 'dad made a few brews with it back in the day'.

While I’ve been giving the Williams Warns and Black Rock kits a go of late, a chance find of a Coopers Lager while doing the supermarket shopping has led us to brew one of their lagers.

A bit of google research shows us Coopers is a large Australian owned brewery known for great sparkling ales and their original pale ale. They are also almost synonymous with home brewing and their home microbrewing kits are very popular.

So this extract kit we are brewing comes with a good reputation for quality and I'm are going to assume a great taste!

So is there anything special I need to know about brewing a lager from a kit?

There’s a general rule of home brewing that’s often stated as an absolute so take this with a great 'grain of salt' when I say that it’s easy to make an ale than a larger.

Or perhaps more accurately stated, it is easier to hide anything brewing mistakes with an ale than a larger. This is largely due to the strength of the beer's flavours.

The first thing to consider is that the word lager is derived from a German word, lagern. It means ‘to store’. This should be a strong clue on how to make a good lager – they were originally stored for a long period in cold caves – and thus the lagering process was born as storing beer properly is really important.

So here's your instructions:

Patience is an absolutely needed virtue here. 

Due to lager yeasts operating best at lower temperatures, they actually ferment the beer at a lower rate than compared to ales which often ferment at higher temperatures.

This can mean that to get a lager brewed from a kit to be at its best for drinking, you may need to let it ‘lager’ for more weeks than you normally let an ale sit. So hide it in a dark corner of the garden shed.

And maybe brewing it during winter.

I digress. 

While I will be using the yeast that comes with a Cooper’s kit, when making a lager one could always use a yeast that is a true lager yeast. If you're feeling adventurous, you might want to order the Lager YeastWL833 - it's a popular yeast for lager brewing.

There’s plenty of more things to think about brewing lagers but I need to move on.

So to the actual preparation of the Coopers Lager kit

To get the true taste and worth of this extract kit, I'm not adding any extra flavours and we used dextrose only. No beer enhancer and no additional hops were added.

This might be somewhat of a mistake but for once I felt the need to try the kit on its own merits where the true flavours and characteristics of the beer wort alone come out to play.

This is a standard brew. I'm are not doing anything special and I'm are basically following the instructions on the can. Not that you necessarily must do this.

As usual, I sanitised the heck out of our fermenter drum to make sure that no sneaky microbes were lurking. First up we added one KG of dextrose to one litre of freshly boiled water and made sure it was mixed well – easily enough to do when the water is that hot!

I then added the contents of the kit.

Before I actually poured the malty goodness into the fermenter as well, I boiled the kettle. I then added the kit’s contents. I then added the boiled water into the can nearly all the way to the top. This way the extract would melt and I would be able to get all of it out from the can. 

Be careful though, the can will get very hot so I like to transfer it to the fermenter with a tea towel.

I then added 23 or so litres of water from the garden hose. This cools the wort to the point where the yeast has an environment to do its thing. If I added the yeast to the wort without the cool water, it would probably die.

Speaking of yeast, I should mention that before I did anything during this brew, I added it to a glass of warm water to activate it. The theory is that doing so gives the yeast more of a chance to compete with the wort itself. 

If that makes any sense.

Then I put the lid on the fermenter and placed it in the man cave covered in several sheets.

And then I waited.

I waited for 10 days which is possibly a little longer brewing time than needed and then I bottled.

And then I waited three weeks.

Remember above when I mentioned patience? You need to have GNR's Patience level of patience. 

This felt like an eternity but I had some bohemian pilsners to keep my throat wet so it wasn’t such a hardship….

So what’s the verdict on my Cooper’s lager?

I made a decent homebrew beer! 

This was a no nonsense brew. No hops, no beer enhancer.

To my mind, this meant I got to get to try the true characteristics of the beer.

Featuring a nice clear gold colour, it tasted like a standard beer. 

It had an OK head but fairly little body but no worse than some other beers I have made without enhancer (Coopers do their own enhancer if you're in the market for some). While this was not an amazing brew, I have produced a genuinely good drinking beer, if not one that would benefit from a good body.

This will be best served quite chilled and to that end, would be quite nice to drink at the end of a long hot day. 

By my reckoning, the beer was a shade over 4 percent alcohol by volume.

I figure if you were going to add hops you would not going wrong with a combination of both Moteuka and Saaz hops. (speaking of Saaz, check out my Riwika hops and lager experiment)

Grab a kit from Amazon today.

Update:

I also have now taken a couple of turns with the Coopers Pale Ale kits. I found they are pretty basic kits. To get the best out of them you definitely need to use an enhancer and the kit strongly benefits from the use of hops. I found the Pale Ales take a while to be drinkable and from 4 weeks on after conditioning, they were fine to drink when served cold.

Overall, I would not recommend brewing with a Coopers Pale Ale kit - unless you want 'cheap beer'.  

* Having actually tasted parsnip wine, I can confirm it to be one of the most horrid liquids in existence. 

2 comments beer kit review, coopers, how to brew with a beer kit, lager, micro brewing, pale ale