Tin Brewing with Beer Kits

This guide to tin brewing with beer kits shows you how to make your own homemade beer without cracked grains or fancy equipment. There are many ways to brew at home, and tin brewing is one of the easiest.

Welcome to Tin Brewing 101 with The Artisans Bottega

TAB Tip: Here at The Artisans Bottega, we stock many easy-to-use beer kits that make 23 litres of beer and can be brewed in any 30-litre fermenting vessel with minimal equipment.

The basics of tin brewing

Brewing with a brew tin takes six easy steps on brew day:

1. Sanitise your equipment.
2. Mix your brew kit with water and add the required sugars.
3. Top up the water to roughly 23 litres.
4. Pitch the yeast.
5. Install your airlock.
6. Wait roughly 2 weeks for it to ferment.

Once it has fermented, you can bottle your brew using carbonation drops to add the sugar it needs to carbonate. Then leave it for another week before you invite all of your friends to enjoy it.

Equipment for tin brewing

Although you can make these brews with minimal equipment, there are still a few things you need, and all of them are available from our store.

• A brewing vessel. In this case we recommend one of our 30 litre plastic fermenters.
• An airlock and grommet (if needed)
• A sanitiser
• A tap for the fermenter
• A stick-on thermometer
• A spoon for stirring and mixing
• A hydrometer for checking the sugar and alcohol levels
• A measuring cylinder for the hydrometer

TAB Tip: As we have always said, sanitisation is a key part of this process. Make sure that any equipment that touches the brew is sanitised, including spoons and other stirring equipment.

Bear in mind that a sanitiser is different from a detergent. After cleaning any gunk off your equipment, it is important to use a sanitiser. We recommend any of our no-rinse sanitisers, such as potassium metabisulphite.

Get ready to brew

The time has come! After sanitising your equipment, make sure you have the following equipment and ingredients:

• Beer tin
• Yeast, which is usually supplied with the tin
• Over 23 litres of water
• Extra sugar for fermentation (you can use dextrose for extra alcohol content but no extra flavour)

With a brew tin, all you have to do is empty the contents of the tin into a few litres of water, add your sugar, and boil it all together just until it is mixed and there are no more sugar solids.

Next, empty that mixture into your fermenter, add the water, and stir. At this point, we recommend you use a hydrometer to check the sugar level of your wort.

Extract some of the liquid into the measuring cylinder and check the level at which the hydrometer floats. This tells you how much sugar is currently in the mixture, and therefore how much alcohol you will end up with when it ferments.

Aim for roughly 4% sugar for a beer. If the sugar is too low, add some more malt extract or dextrose, and if it is too high, add some water. After this, you can pitch your yeast by simply adding it to the fermenter.

However, make sure the temperature of the wort is not higher than 22° Celsius, otherwise you run the risk of shocking the yeast. After you have added the yeast, install the lid and airlock, filling the airlock with a clear alcohol or water up to the line, and let the brew ferment for 2 weeks. When the hydrometer tells you there is no sugar left and it reads consistently for a couple of days, you are ready to bottle. Make sure there is no sugar left in the brew, otherwise it could re-ferment in the bottles and cause a mess.

Fermenting

Once you have added the yeast and installed your airlock, the mixture will start to foam and bubbles will start escaping through the airlock. This means your brew is fermenting, and it is completely normal. The yeast will start to convert the sugars in your wort to alcohol and release carbon dioxide in the process.

The airlock helps the carbon dioxide escape. A build-up of this gas creates pressure, and if it cannot escape you end up with a messy explosion of your vessel and a ruined brew. We know this is probably a lot of new information for first-time brewers, and you might be wondering: what if my brew does not foam, or what if there aren’t any bubbles coming out of the airlock? There could be a couple of reasons for this:

• First, if it has been a couple of days, check the brew with a hydrometer. If it has been fermenting, there may be a leak somewhere that the gas is escaping from, so seal that up and let it go.
• The temperature may be too cold or too hot. If it is too cold, there are a number of ways to heat up your mixture, and we recommend a heating belt or heating pad that you can use to bring the temperature up by a few degrees. If the mixture got too hot and it is not fermenting, you may have killed the yeast, so add some more yeast and move the brew to a cooler area.
• If the wort was too hot when you added the yeast, you may have shocked and killed it, so try adding more yeast to get it going again.
• If it isn’t the temperature and you aren’t sure what’s wrong, you can try adding some yeast nutrients to give the yeast a boost. If the yeast is dead, rehydrate some yeast with a bit of sugar and water and add that in.

After 2 weeks the foaming and bubbling should settle down. This is when you check your brew’s sugar level, aiming for a reading of 0 sugar. Once it reads this for a couple of days in a row and fermentation has fully stopped, you are ready to start bottling.

Bottling your brew

When you are ready to bottle, make sure all of your bottles and bottling equipment are fully sanitised. Depending on the size of your bottle, add 1 or 2 carbonation drops before closing the lid: 1 drop for 375ml bottles, and 2 drops for 750ml bottles.

After this, wait a week for the brew to carbonate and then you can start enjoying your beer. Store it in either the fridge or a cool, dry place.

Your future brews

From here, there are a few ways you can start customising your tin beers. Using a different yeast strain is a great way to bring different flavours to your beer. You can also add hops to your brew for a hoppier flavour. The best way to do this is with the little hop bags made by Morgan’s.

These little hop bags contain a small amount of hops in a bag that you can add to your brew as it ferments. After you have mastered the basics of kit brewing, you can move on to grain brewing.

Grain brewing is a lot more complex and involved, but it gives you full control over the flavours of your beer. The basic fermentation process is much the same, but there is a lot more preparation of the wort, such as boiling the grains and adding the hops. However, kit brewing takes out most of the work, so it remains the best way to get started making delicious beers.

Thank you for reading our articles and allowing us to share our artisan expertise with you. If you follow our brewing tutorials or share this information with your friends and family, don’t forget to tag us on our socials @artisans.bottega and share your pictures!

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