The Dog House is a reader supported website. If you make a purchase using the links on our site, we may earn a commission at no cost to you.

10 Best Home Brew Kits For 2021

Best home brew kits: Make tasty, award winning beers and become a master brewer!

best beer making kits
  • The ultimate gift for every craft beer connoisseur and pub loving bloke in the world (ahem… all of us), home brew kits are a fun and hands on way to explore your love of a bev and open your eyes to a new hobby that makes drinking copious amounts of beer on the weekend half-way acceptable!
  • From hearty real ale to refreshing IPAs and creamy stouts, there’s a brewing kit out there for every man that reflects their own unique tastes.
  • Whether you’re experienced in brewing or a complete novice, home brew kits range in their difficulty, so that everyone can take up the practice without feeling out of their depth!
  • To help you find the best option for you, we’ve picked out a series of brilliant home brewing kits, with a focus on easy to use starter sets with reusable equipment and recipe kits that feature flavoursome, award-winning beers you can replicate at home!

Our Top Picks For Brewing Beer At Home

The Best Home Brewing Kits

Gone are the days when home brewing was just the strange, smelly and unsuccessful venture of crazy old uncles who dwell in their sheds.

Because as man’s taste, opinions and enjoyment of beer has evolved over the last few decades, so too has the home brew kit market, and after hearing countless stories of fellas brewing beer in their garages and suddenly becoming millionaires – men everywhere are now dreaming of becoming master brewers.

If you’re still yet to dabble in the dark arts of the home brew, choosing a kit and understanding its contents can be a bit daunting at first, but we’re here to make sure you avoid any slip ups when it comes to picking a superior pint maker.

The best home brew kit is the Woodefordes Micro Brewery Kit, as it has all the equipment you need to get started, as well as a 40 pint pack of CAMRA award-winning real ale to bottle up your first brews

To find the ultimate home brew kits that combine both simplicity and quality, we’ve looked into hundreds of brewing products from all your favourite online marketplaces – including Firebox, Amazon and Menkind.

To help you find the best option for your experience level, we’ve then selected the top ten home brew kits based on a variety of criteria, such as equipment included, beer quantity made and brew time.

The result is a fantastic list of excellent starter sets with essential equipment, as well as advanced recipes for the experienced brewer, meaning any level of brewer can find exactly what they’re looking for.

It’s time to quit being a boozer… and start being a brewer.

Home Brew Kit Buying Guide

Here we’ll go over some of the basic features and information you need to be looking out for when browsing for the best home brew kit for you.

For an in-depth buying guide to home brew kits, read our beginner’s guide here.

Things To Consider

Included Equipment

If you’re a beginner to home brewing, you may not have all the equipment you need to be able to successfully create and bottle your own batch. Try and aim to purchase a starter kit which includes all the necessary things you need. These are:

  • Fermentation bucket
  • A large plastic bucket with airlock lid and stopper
  • Nylon bags for grains and hop straining
  • Hydrometer
  • Thermometer
  • Bottles, kegs or pressure barrels for finished product (capper or bottling wand also needed if bottles)
  • Food safe sanitiser
  • Mixing paddle or large spoon
  • Racking cane/siphon
  • Brewing kettle (only if advanced recipe)

Getting as many of these as you can from one kit can save you time and money and it means when buying kits in the future you can purchase cheaper recipes or refill kits that don’t contain any extras.

Type, Strength & Quantity of Beer

Ultimately, the main thing which needs to dictate your choice of brewing kit is the actual beer type it produces. Because why waste your time whipping up a posh homemade lager if you never drink the stuff?

Also try and pay attention to the ABV(Alcohol by Volume) and quantity of the finished kit, so you can be certain of how strong your beer will be and how long it will last you for.

Knowing the correct quantity will also help you work out how best to store your finished beer!

Easy To Use/Low Difficulty Instructions

For first timers, it’s no fun having to spend several hours researching a brewing manual in order to get on with making your home brew. Leave experimenting with timings and grain amounts to the advanced brewing Einsteins of this world, what you need is an easy to follow set of instructions which tell you what’s needed in simple and clear steps.

Pale and light ales tend to be the easiest beginner brews to make at home, so try and aim for an IPA kit if you’re a little apprehensive about giving things a go!

Price & Quality of Materials

Home brewing kits vary drastically in terms of the quality of the product, ranging from brew in a bag options to fully automated microbrewing machines which do everything for you at the touch of a button!

Naturally, this means the range in price is also quite different, but most traditional home kits will cost you between £20 – £60. For those in the upper end of that price range, you’ll want to be sure you’re not only getting lot’s of the equipment you need, but also high-quality ingredients.

Quality of materials may not matter to you so much when first starting out, as it’s just as easy to make beer in a plastic fermenting bucket as it is a stainless-steel, mega fermentation pod (OK, we made that up, but you get the idea). We’d suggest keeping things cheap equipment wise at first, then if home brewing becomes more of a passion and something you want to get more advanced at, you can begin looking into mash kettles and advanced equipment!

Your Home Brew Kit Questions Answered

Are home brew kits safe?

Yes, home brew kits are perfectly safe and you’d have to do some serious tampering with the recipe to even come close to creating a potentially harmful beverage.

Even if you somehow managed to get the recipe wrong, you’re never going to create the next anthrax with the items at hand and so the worst outcome is always just going to be a really rotten tasting beer!

We’ve all heard the horror stories about old blokes creating vats of moonshine in their shed and giving themselves alcohol poisoning, but home brew kits are a far more structured, instructional affair, leaving little room for error.

The only real potential hazard is cleanliness, as poor sanitation could make you ill, so make sure to always clean up your equipment!

How long do home brew kits take to work?

Making beer isn’t a ten second process, as it needs to go through a fermentation process which takes time.

The act of preparing the beer however (mixing ingredients, boiling wort etc.) takes only a few hours, making it a fun and easy activity to wile away your time with.

Once in a fermenter though, it becomes a waiting game and will often take at least a few weeks to become suitable for bottling.

Standard waiting times range between 20 – 30 days for a 40 pint batch and the shortest you’ll ever usually find is a minimum of one week.