I received the Mr. Beer kit for Xmas, and it’s a good system overall. It serves as a very good introduction to home brewing, but it does have some downsides as well.

Good bits:
-The system is about as easy as it could be.
-The instructions are clear and simple.
-The fermenting tank is small (2 gallons), meaning that you don’t have to wait around for a long time to taste the final product. With your more normal 5 gallon kits, you have to bottle a LOT of beer, and wait a bit longer for fermentation.
-There’s dozens of mixes available on their homepage, and they offer a lot of quality products at reasonable prices. Join their club to avoid the expensive shipping charges.

Not so good bits:
-The fermenter is almost too simple. A proper airlock design would make it more foolproof as to tell when fermenting is complete, as well as avoiding contamination of the beer.
-The included mixes, while of good quality, produce a rather poor beer by comparison to what it is possible to make with the kit. Their website has a lot better product than what they include in the kit, and this gives some people bad impressions of the kit itself. The fault is not with the kit, but with the very basic starter beer in the package. The separate mixes they sell in stores are not much better, being all very basic brews. They’re not bad, but they’re not great either. Mediocre at best.
-Sterilization (which is possibly the most important part of home brewing) is difficult because the fermenter is not dishwasher safe. A higher quality plastic that could stand high temperatures would be a better overall choice for the fermenting keg, since automatic dishwashers are a great way to sterilize your equipment easily.

My suggestions on how to use this kit correctly:
-Go to their website and pick up some of the more advanced receipes instead of using the mixes as given initially. If you’ve used those included mixes, don’t be disappointed overall, it’s that the mixes are very basic. Using the better receipes and the better ingredients, you can make quite incredible brews.
-Keep the fermenter in an enclosed dark space during the fermenting process. I recommend a large cooler. This avoids contamination of the product as well as keeping it at a steady temparature.
-Be very, very careful to sterilize completely. The OneStep cleanser they include is very good, but you do have to use it properly. Read the instructions and be sure that everything gets cleaned extremely well.
-No matter what the instructions say, bottle conditioning takes longer than a week. Really. Wait 2 weeks, preferably 4, before you crack the first bottle. The beer only gets better the longer you let it mature in the bottles.
-Go easy on the sugar. Too much sugar in the bottles and they will explode, or taste like cider.

If you use the kit as intended and with a careful eye for cleanliness, then you can produce some excellent quality brews in a very short time. But follow those instructions precisely. Anything less will result in poor quality brews.

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After using it for over a year, I have some more things to add:

- DO NOT OVERTIGHTEN THE LID. The lid must allow the gases produced MUST escape. This is especially true with their higher alcohol mixes and stouts. If you overtighten, the end result will be spilled beer and a ruined keg. I brewed a dopplebock using the keg, and overtightened it. Result: The keg overpressurized and almost burst. Some foam came out of the top of the keg, and spilled into my cooler. The residue, once it dried, provided food for.. well.. not so nice creatures. The keg was naturally unusable afterwards. However, this was my own fault, and a new keg only cost me $10 through the Mr. Beer website, so it was not a total loss. And the beer (since it was not contaminated due to the pressure differential, I bottled it anyway) turned out to be absolutely spectacular. So whatever you do, don’t tighten it too much. A little hand pressure for tightening is enough.

- Again, go easy on the sugar when bottling! Somebody told me that they had one of the plastic bottles burst on them and the remainder tasted like cider. This is the result of excessive sugar in the bottling process. I highly recommend you get the sugar measure that they sell, if you are bottling in the 12oz, 22oz, or 1 liter sizes. The sugar measure is very easy to use and exact in nature. Takes out the measurements and guesswork.

- Finally, I do not recommend normal bottles with a capper. These are difficult to use and contrary to popular belief, do not produce better beer. The screw top bottles are simplest because they hold the pressure in properly and are trivially simple to use. Alternatively, Mr. Beer sells 16 oz “Grolsch style” bottles on their site, which are the rubber grommeted wired cappers, and they work very well. If you must bottle with glass, get those. Or go find similarly capped bottles of beer and use those bottles (after dishwashing, of course). Glass is much easier to sterilize because it’s disahwasher safe. Just take the rubber caps off first.

Having read most of the reviews here for Mr. Beer I felt I would add my two cents. I have brewed beer using the standard “medieval sorcery” kit that is advertised on most homebrew websites and with the Mr. Beer kit. Having done both, I prefer the Mr. Beer kit. The Mr. Beer kit is a great introduction to brewing. You can make it as simple as you want or do more complicated things with it as well. It is simply a scaled-down, stand-alone, and single-stage fermenter. If you want to do a full boil on your wort, add fruits etc. and use it for that, it can work just as well as any other plastic pail. The nice thing for beginners is that it comes with nearly everything for brewing your first beer for half the price of even the cheapest “starter” kits at most brew shops. The thing that I like about it versus other systems is that it makes a smaller amount, takes up less space, and Mr. Beer, as a company, is really dedicated to making homebrewing simple and fun. I have emailed them with various questions and comments, and their service has been impeccable. They have some great recipes and products available, all scaled down to a more manageable size in my opinion. I think the system itself is acceptable quality. The keg is sturdy enough, dark colored to protect against UV, and the spicket works well. The venting system at first seemed to be a little on the cheap side (airlock would probably be better, particularly in judging when fermentation is complete-earlier models had them), but I have had no problems with beer spoilage. Mr. Beer is a great place to start (and stay) if you are looking to start brewing your own beer as a hobby and not spend hours cleaning equipment, preparing mashes/worts to precise temperatures, and spending an hour bottling 5 gallons worth of beer every three weeks.

I got the Mr. Beer kit from a buddy a few weeks before Christmas, and have been having an absolute blast with it! By far the best Christmas present I got this year.
The nice part about Mr. Beer is that the standard recipe process is very easy to do (read: very hard to screw up). This gives an inexperienced brewer like me the confidence to be imaginitive and creative, while keeping the chances of really messing up a batch pretty low. I’ve already done standard ales, honey wheat ale, and honey-apple ale. All taste very good, and the taste continues to improve!!
This is a MUST-have gift for any die-hard beer drinker!!

Overall, I think this is a good product. It worked quite well and the instructions were clear and easy to understand. In my opinion, I made good beer on my first attempt. I will continue to try the other recipes.

Evaluating this on taste is purely subjective and highly biased on what you consider as good beer. The first batch is an Ale, not a lager like most americans prefer to drink. Most store bought beer is also over carbonated so it can sit on the shelf. If you have bad results, one of three things occurred; didn’t follow instructions/recomendations, malt/yeast product was old, or simply you don’t like the style of beer. Ale is fermented at warmer temperatures than lager so it will taste different.

If cheap plain beer is want you are after, this is not for you. You are better off going to the liquor store. If you want to try different styles and obsess over the process, ingredients and the taste, you will like this.

The thing I like the most is the 2 gallon batch size. Its not too big. – I don’t drink very often or a lot at any one time so w/ only 2 gallons I won’t have a lot drink before the next batch. Especially if its not my favorite type and since making it is half of the fun anyhow.

By trade, I am a Chemical Process Engineer so I am analytical, methodical and deliberate in every thing I do. If you are anything like me and you like beer made at micro breweries you will enjoy this product!

This is really a fantastic introductory kit to brewing beer. Those who find they enjoy it can move on to more expensive and more complicated methods and equipment later, without socking out a huge investment in the first place. Those who find they don’t enjoy it can go back to drinking budweiser from the 7-11.

At first I was somewhat skeptical about whether this would work, and if it did, what quality the results would be. I’d been interested in homebrewing, but most kits were expensive and somewhat daunting. Mr. Beer makes it simple. I convinced my wife to get me one for Xmas, figuring I’d give it a shot. I followed their instructions, except I added a cup of honey to the wort while mixing it up, not to add flavor (though it may do this as well), but to boost the alcohol level from the standard 3.7% up to 4.6%. I let it ferment probably longer than necessary (almost 3 weeks), but with the added fermentable honey I wanted to give it a good chance to do its thing. I pulled a shot glass of the fermented but uncarbonated beer out of the keg to see if it was ready to bottle. Wow! It tasted like beer (I was expecting something else, so I was pleasantly surprised), and not bad beer either! Picked up some bottles and caps, but forgot to get a bottlecapper. In a hurry to bottle, I decided to go with 16.9 oz bottled water bottles. Sterilized them according to the instructions, added sugar (for additional fermentation to add carbonization), filled them up, capped them, and waited. After a day or so I noticed they were falling down. The bottoms were expanding due to the pressure inside, and were becoming round. Well, at least they were working…

After just over a week, I popped one bottle in the fridge overnight. Just opened it, and while I’m sure it’ll get better with more “conditioning time” in the fridge, it’s really great. A bit hoppy, but then it is a pale ale (not as hoppy as an IPA, but more than your usual lager). The honey gave it a nice smooth finish, and a decent kick in the alcohol. All in all, I’m extremely pleased with the results, and I’ll be trying both a Weisbier and an Irish Stout. I’ll probably move on to more sophisticated equipment somewhere down the line (already have that bottle capper on order), but Mr. Beer was a great start. It’s cheap enough, and the results are good enough, that I’d recommend it to anyone interested in homebrewing.

Mr. Beer’s home brew kit a great, fun way to introduce yourself to the art and craft of homebrewing. I recieved Mr. Beer as a Christmas gift from my wife, and have enjoyed it thourougly.
The wonder of brewing beer at home is that it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. I’ve brewed beer at home on a few occaisions, and the typical home brew process and equipment can be a bit intimidating to the neophyte. Sorry, but a plastic 5 gallon bucket full of wort does not inspire confidence. The beer snobs you find at most home brew shops only add to the difficulty of the process, and the books available on the subject seem to be writen with chemists and moonshiners in mind.
Mr. Beer takes the guess work out of the process, allowing the newbie home brewer to proceed with confidence. Brewing beer at home is as simple as preparing condensed soup.
But what if you want to experiment with fruit beers? Different kinds of hops? Different malt blends? Lager yeasts?

Never fear. Mr. Beer is marvelously flexible, allowing you to take your home brewing as far as you like, and the recipes and instructions included with the kit show you exactly how to do it. Mr. Beer also offers a wide variety of malts and hops, as well as both ale and lager yeasts premeasured for use with their kit.
The only real downside to Mr. Beer’s brew kit is that you are more or less restricted to using Mr. Beer malt extracts. Most malt extracts come in 3 lb cans, standard for a 5 gallon brew, but Mr. Beer uses a 2 lbs can. Measuring out the malt can be messy, and there’s really no way to preserve the left-overs. If you really want to broaden your beer horizons, you’ll eventually graduate to the more standard 5 gallon set up.
Bottom Line: Mr. Beer is the perfect way to find out if home brewing is something you’d like to do. There’s no significant financial investment in the equipment, and there’s lots of room to try different techniques explore different ingredients. Highly recommended.

I bought this as a Christmas gift for my girlfriend and she loves it. After researching home brewing, we changed the Mr. Beer recommendations by melting the sugar in water before adding to beer mixture and we purchased glass bottles and caps at the local brewery. We made the beer that came with the kit and have since tried fruit beers. So far, everything has come out great. If you sanitize your bottles, you can use them over and over and the Mr. Beer mixes cost between $12 and $15 which makes enough for 24 bottles. We have no complaints.

I have been using this kit for over a year and it has been terrific. I too had one of the “professional home brewer” set ups before, but all of that collects dust now in the basement. This is so much easier and quicker to make. I made up a box of all of the tools and I have all of the steps in my head now, and I can get two kegs fermenting in an hour, then 3 weeks later, I can get the bottles sanitized and filled in about an hour, too. The best way to do this however, is to ferment in the keg at the same you are fermenting in the bottles so that you are producing on a constant, rotating basis, thus when you empty the keg to fill the bottles, refill the keg and get it going with a new batch at the same sitting. Doing this with one keg (and fermenting for 3 weeks) you will get 8 quarts every 3 weeks. Frankly, it’s not much more work once you are working on one keg to prepare a second, thus increasing production to 16 quarts every 3 weeks, equal to 1 3/4 cases every 3 weeks. After shipping costs, the beer ends up being under $1.50 per quart. I find the quality of the beer to be good, although I do not try to alter the basic recipes. Leaving the beer longer than 3 weeks may help, I don’t know.

Oh yes, and support from the company is great by e-mail and phone. They understand the happier you are the more they sell.

As far as the air-lock goes that other have complained about… it works perfectly well. I don’t see how a “real” one would improve anything. I will complain about the spigot, it does not lock in place and you are resigned to holding it open while the entire 2 gallons comes out, and that takes a while.

I have had this for a couple months and i love it. I have made 3 or 4 beers with it and with the exception of the beer kit that came with the set all have been great. I suggest to throw out the Booster pack and get more malt extract, trust me makes a way better beer. Also, if you go to the Mr Beer site you can buy the keg/fermenter for $10 and get better ingredients for the same price. If you join the Brew Club you get free shipping on orders over $30. I now own 2 fermenter and brew 5 gallons at a time. I recommend the product but think you can get better stuff directly from the source.