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After a new round of testing, the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy Homebrew Starter Kit remains our top pick, but we have new budget and upgrade picks, as well. Electric Brew Kettle
Brewing beer is simple: It involves just four ingredients and a few relatively straightforward steps. The payoff is great, too—not only is this a rewarding hobby that allows you to iterate, tweak, and make something all your own, but that “something” you make is, well … lots of beer. Yet despite beer brewing’s simplicity and rewards, getting started can seem daunting. After more than 35 hours of research—not to mention brewing at home for over five years—I’ve found that the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy Homebrew Starter Kit is the easiest way for most first-timers to make their initial batch. It includes most of the essential tools, providing a solid foundation you can build on as you progress in the hobby. The kit also comes with clear instructions and reliable support—seven days a week—to handle any questions you might have during the brewing process.
This is the best kit we’ve found for beginners. It includes more of the most important tools than other kits, and it costs less. And Northern Brewer provides excellent support.
This kit comes with a big, heavy-duty stainless kettle (which you won’t have to replace as soon as you would the ones from cheaper kits), plus a copper immersion chiller and a better fermenter.
If you just prefer smaller batches, or you’re looking for a low-cost way into the hobby, this 1-gallon kit will make great beer. But you may want to upgrade quickly if you get into the hobby.
This is the best kit we’ve found for beginners. It includes more of the most important tools than other kits, and it costs less. And Northern Brewer provides excellent support.
Northern Brewer’s Brew Share Enjoy Homebrew Starter Kit has everything you need to begin brewing, including a 5-gallon kettle (essentially a large stock pot) and a 21-inch stirring spoon—two items most other kits in this price category don’t include. It has better brewing instructions than other kits, and Northern Brewer’s support is available every day of the week (major holidays aside), to help guide you through any hiccups you might encounter. Although the quality of the beer produced in any kit depends on a huge number of variables (most of which are in the brewer’s hands), this kit gives you a great chance at success. Taste-wise, any of the three recipes that you can choose for your kit—including an American amber ale, a hefeweizen, and an IPA—should satisfy the average craft beer fan. And there are dozens more at Northern Brewer and other homebrew shops that you can purchase separately.
This kit comes with a big, heavy-duty stainless kettle (which you won’t have to replace as soon as you would the ones from cheaper kits), plus a copper immersion chiller and a better fermenter.
If you’re relatively certain you’re going to stick with homebrewing for years to come, the MoreBeer Premium Home Brewing Kit may be a better initial investment than the Brew Share Enjoy. That’s because it comes with a larger, heavier-gauge, 8½-gallon kettle with a ball valve. This kettle upgrade will allow you to make larger batches and transfer your beer to the fermenter more easily, and it will last longer as well. You also get a copper immersion chiller (a pricey add-on for our top pick that makes cooling beer after the boil much easier) and a clear plastic fermenter with a ball valve (which makes it easy to see what’s happening during fermentation and to bottle your beer once it’s ready).
If you just prefer smaller batches, or you’re looking for a low-cost way into the hobby, this 1-gallon kit will make great beer. But you may want to upgrade quickly if you get into the hobby.
If you’re intimidated by the volume of a 5-gallon kit, you don’t have a lot of space to make your own beer, or you simply want to experiment with smaller batches, consider a 1-gallon kit. Though the effort involved is still considerable, a 1-gallon kit makes the process less intense. The Northern Brewer Craft Beer Making Kit With Siphonless Fermenter comes with more of the most important brewing tools than other small-batch kits have, and it is backed by the company’s friendly and dependable customer service. This kit includes your choice of four recipes—a brown ale, a wheat beer, an IPA, and an Irish red ale—and Northern Brewer offers many more options à la carte. Just bear in mind that you’ll get only about eight to 10 bottles of beer out of each 1-gallon batch.
I’ve been brewing beer more or less nonstop since 2016, in which time I’ve brewed more than 115 batches covering a huge range of styles. I started with a standard partial mash 5-gallon homebrewing kit—a former version of our top pick from Northern Brewer, actually. But eventually I progressed to using an electric all-in-one system. My garage currently contains more than 300 pounds of malt, and my freezer holds over 30 pounds of hops. I’ve got a four-tap keezer (a chest freezer kegerator) that’s always full. And at any given time, I have at least three more beers fermenting, plus long-term barrel projects and mixed-culture fermentations. I also maintain a homebrewing blog with literally dozens of readers, and I’ve even won a few awards for my beer. Yeah, I’m in pretty deep.
But I wanted the perspective of other homebrewing experts. So to round out the gaps in my knowledge, I talked to Denny Conn, co-author of Simple Homebrewing, Experimental Homebrewing, and Homebrew All-Stars, as well as the co-host of the Experimental Brewing podcast; Sarah Flora, homebrewing YouTuber and host of the Brewing After Hours podcast; and Marshall Schott, creator of homebrewing science site Brülosophy and host of the Brülosophy podcast. (Brülosophy has affiliate relationships with several stores that sell homebrewing kits, including MoreBeer, Great Fermentations, Adventures in Homebrewing, and Atlantic Brew Supply; Flora also has relationships with MoreBeer and Great Fermentations.)
For previous versions of this guide, writer Tyler Wells Lynch also spoke with John Palmer, author of How to Brew; Gary Glass, former director of the American Homebrewers Association and current lead brewer at Left Hand Brewing Co., in Longmont, Colorado; and Ben Holmes, then president and CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Co. in Somerville, Massachusetts, and current president of Fermentation Arts Brewery.
If you’re interested in learning the craft of brewing beer, a kit can be a great place to start. The tools you find in most prepackaged kits are generally of comparable quality to those you can buy individually, and a kit has everything you need (including recipes and ingredients) to brew, ferment, and bottle your homebrew.
Brewing is an endlessly deep rabbit hole—no matter how good your beer is, it can always be better. There are always new techniques to learn, new recipes to try, and new bits of gear to acquire. But our experts all agreed that there’s no reason to complicate things too much when you’re getting started. “Beginner homebrewers should know that you have the rest of your life to geek out on equipment,” Sarah Flora advised, adding, “but the first step is to learn how to make good beer.”
We recommend that most first-time brewers buy a 5-gallon kit. Since it takes as much time and effort to brew a 1-gallon batch as a 5-gallon batch, we think it’s worth having a larger yield to show for your work. But there are pros to going small, too. Marshall Schott, for one, told us he loves the idea of starting with a 1-gallon kit. “I have to imagine those who live in smaller spaces or people who like experimenting with different recipes would appreciate it,” he said. Denny Conn agreed that the batch-size question ultimately depends on your circumstances, saying, “Small batches are practical and popular now, so you need to examine your situation and see what works best for you.”
If you’ve never considered making beer before, you might be wondering what you’re in for. Here’s a quick primer to calibrate your expectations. (If this isn’t your first brew, feel free to skip ahead.)
Brewing beer takes time—usually two to 12 weeks from brewing to drinking, depending on the style you’ve chosen to make. The good news is that most of that time is passive, consisting of fermentation and conditioning. The actual work of brewing comprises about four to six hours on brew day and another couple of hours on packaging day. Overall, it’s not a lot of work.
Beer consists of four main ingredients: malt, hops, yeast, and water. Although lots of popular styles use other stuff, including lactose, spices, and other flavorings, the basics are all that’s needed to brew some of the best beer in the world (just ask the Germans). I’m not going to go too deeply into what each ingredient contributes or the precise details of the brewing process. But if you want to know more, John Palmer’s How to Brew is a great, free introduction.
Brewing involves a fair few steps, but it can be boiled down to the following process:
These basic steps can take you a long way toward making great beer. For more resources when starting out, Conn also recommends that newbies check out Charlie Papazian’s The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, in addition to John Palmer’s book.
And if you don’t like your first batch, don’t quit. Schott told us that the one tip he gives to every new brewer is to brew at least three times before giving up. “There are a lot of steps in brewing, which makes it easy to mess something up on one’s initial batches,” he said. “Don’t let that stop you from trying it again!”
There are a million and one ways to homebrew. Here’s the (relatively) simple kit that one obsessive brewer has developed over four years of trial and error.
A good homebrewing kit should include a certain set of essential items, which we’ll detail below. But a kit should also set you up for success in your brewing journey, and that means its makers need to be aware of the latest industry trends, from safety improvements to ways to streamline the brewing process. The kit designers also need to keep you safe from potential pitfalls.
For example, old-school brewing rules mandated that every beer should be transferred to a new fermenter for a secondary fermentation after the main (aka primary) fermentation was finished. New-school thinking eschews the use of a secondary fermenter, since unnecessary transfers are just another way to expose beer to oxidation and infection. “That concept is outdated, and if the kit makes that mistake, it might make others,” Conn told us.
Another recent innovation we love is the rise of siphonless fermentation systems, which use fermenters with ball-lock valves, a length of vinyl tubing, and gravity to move beer from a fermenter into a bottling bucket. In terms of ease of use, this is a huge upgrade over older kits that required you to use a siphon (video) to move beer, and it helps reduce the risk of oxidizing your beer. “Any kit that doesn’t have valves on both the fermenter and bottling bucket isn’t worth it,” Flora told us, adding (with just a touch of hyperbole), “the valve costs all of 10 cents and will save you the stress of attempting to pour or siphon your beer.”
A good kit should also include items that you’ll be able to use throughout your homebrewing journey, rather than saddling you with proprietary or size-limited gear that you’ll need to discard as you upgrade to larger batches or explore different brewing methods. Most of the kits we recommend are designed for making beer using malt extract. Yet almost all of the items the kits include can also be used to make all-grain beer (with a few relatively inexpensive add-ons), especially if you opt to go all-grain with the brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) method (more on this in the Next steps section). We dismissed some kits because they allowed only for extract brewing or were otherwise not upgradeable.
Finally, kits should do their best to keep you safe from mishaps and potential injury. The biggest risk comes from glass carboys, which are heavy and fragile, and if you drop them can cause serious injuries (warning: many photos of glass-related injuries). “I wouldn’t even look sideways at a glass carboy,” Flora said. Schott also called out glass carboys as a red flag that would keep him from recommending a kit.
The other risk comes from “bottle bombs,” which occur when you bottle beer before the yeast is done fermenting. If there’s too much sugar remaining in solution when you bottle, the yeast will keep working, producing CO2, which produces pressure, which can eventually cause your bottles to turn into grenades, complete with glass shrapnel. It’s not pretty. Luckily, there’s an easy way to avoid this: Get a kit with a hydrometer, which can tell you when the gravity (sugar concentration) of the beer has stopped changing. Once the gravity hasn’t dropped for a few days in a row, you’re ready to bottle.
So, with that preamble in mind, here are the essentials a good kit should include:
We strongly recommend avoiding large glass carboys for fermenting.
Many kits come with other items that are helpful but not essential, especially for extract brewing—stuff like a long metal spoon, a bottle brush, or a wort chiller. We’re happy to see these items included but not too bothered if they’re not.
To find kits that meet these standards, we looked at specialist sites like Northern Brewer, MoreBeer, William’s Brewing, Great Fermentations, Adventures in Homebrewing, and Austin Homebrew Supply. But we also checked out Amazon and Walmart just to make sure there weren’t any hidden gems out there. When picking kits to recommend, we focused on ease of use, the number of tools included, the design of certain tools, and the quality and clarity of the instructions. We also looked at price, online user reviews, and availability. For the 2022 update, we considered 21 different homebrewing kits before settling on our recommendations.
When we first reviewed homebrewing kits, in 2017, our testing process was simple. Since the quality of a brewing kit can generally be determined by reading the list of included items, testing was just a matter of getting our top contenders into one room and searching for details that aren’t evident from the store page details.
Once we had all our kits in one room, we unpacked them and looked at each individual item. We quickly found that materials and design differences between individual tools in the kits were virtually nonexistent. The fermenting and bottling buckets were all the same size and all made from the same food-grade polyethylene; the siphons (with just a couple of exceptions) were auto-siphons of the exact same design and material; the bottle fillers and bottle cappers were all identical; the tubing was all vinyl hosing of the exact same length; and most of the kits had identical airlocks.
Given this broad similarity, we paid more attention to the recipe kits and instructions. Specifically, we gave extra credit to kits whose instructions were more thorough, contained helpful illustrations, and pointed to other helpful sources of information. We then made subjective calls as to which ones were the most helpful. Finally, we looked at the recipe kits themselves, focusing on the freshness of the ingredients, but we ultimately didn’t give recipe design too much weight. The included tools are far more important, because although you’ll make the included recipe only once, you’ll be using the equipment over and over. And as John Palmer told us, “A good fermentation of a bad recipe is going to make a better beer than a bad fermentation of a great recipe.”
Finally, we made some beer. We brewed a full, 5-gallon batch with our top pick to make sure there were no unforeseen issues. We followed the instructions to the letter and used only the tools and utensils that were provided, and we did the same with our 1-gallon pick.
To be clear—and this may seem counterintuitive to some—we did not judge these kits based on the quality of the beer we were able to brew. Beer quality is just way too subjective—and there are too many variables involved in the brewing process—to definitively claim one kit is going to produce a better beer than another. Judging a kit for the quality of the beer it produces is sort of like judging a gaming console for the quality of the game you bought.
“A good fermentation of a bad recipe is going to make a better beer than a bad fermentation of a great recipe.”
In 2022, we once again surveyed the homebrewing kits available from the most popular online brew shops, as well as large internet retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Since we learned through our previous testing experience that there isn’t much qualitative difference between the various parts and pieces, this time we made new picks based solely on research. We specifically looked for kits that incorporated the latest trends in the hobby to streamline the brewing, fermentation, and bottling process. Once we had a list of candidates, we made our picks based on which kits included the most crucial items, and we also gave weight to sellers that we know provide excellent customer service.
This is the best kit we’ve found for beginners. It includes more of the most important tools than other kits, and it costs less. And Northern Brewer provides excellent support.
If you’re looking to brew beer for the first time, but you aren’t ready to invest in a fully customized home brewery, the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy Homebrew Starter Kit is a great place to start. For around $100 to $130 (depending on the sales going on when you buy), this kit includes everything you need to begin brewing extract batches right out of the box. Crucially, it comes with a 5-gallon stainless steel kettle, a 21-inch stainless steel stirring spoon, and a hydrometer—three essential tools that other kits sometimes lack. This kit also features a siphonless design, which makes transferring beer after fermentation extremely simple.
The Brew Share Enjoy kit is one of just a few we found at its price point that includes a kettle. This is a great addition to the kit, but it’s also an item you’ll probably want to upgrade down the line. The kettle is made of stainless steel, which is a plus, but it’s on the thin and flimsy side—and its spindly handles aren’t very comfortable to hold when you’re moving 5 gallons of hot wort. Since some liquid evaporates during the boil, the 5-gallon capacity also means you’ll have to top up with more water in the fermenter to reach a 5-gallon batch volume. Some pricier kits (like our upgrade pick from MoreBeer) come with larger kettles that use thicker steel. But if you don’t want to break the bank, this is a fine kettle to start your brewing journey with.
Another important inclusion here is a triple-scale hydrometer, which is crucial not only for determining your beer’s ABV but also for ensuring that fermentation has finished before you bottle it. Northern Brewer’s hydrometer is made from polycarbonate plastic (unlike most other hydrometers that are made of glass), so it’s a lot less likely to shatter when it inevitably rolls off your countertop. (Go ahead, ask me how many hydrometers I’ve broken!)
Old-school kits required you to siphon beer from the fermenter into a bottling bucket after fermentation was complete, but the Brew Share Enjoy kit features a more-modern siphonless design. The fermentation bucket has a ball-valve spigot that allows you to use vinyl tubing and the power of gravity to more easily transfer the beer to the bottling bucket. Not only is this simpler than using a siphon, but it also means there’s one less item to clean when you’re done. The same tubing is then attached to the spigot on the bottling bucket and paired with the spring-tip bottle filler to bottle the beer.
Speaking of bottling, a heads-up: The Brew Share Enjoy kit does not include bottles. This is not unusual among homebrewing kits, and you can either buy bottles from Northern Brewer (and other sites) or collect and reuse your favorite craft beer bottles. However, the kit does come with priming sugar (which you add at bottling to carbonate your beer), bottle caps, a standard wing-style bottle capper, and even a bottle brush to ensure that your bottles are clean and sanitary before you fill them.
The Brew Share Enjoy kit comes with Northern Brewer’s Homebrewing 101 course, a five-chapter seminar that offers a great overview of the basics of the brewing process, from equipment and sanitizing to brewing and fermenting. Printed step-by-step instructions are also included in the box, and they’re unique to the recipe kit you choose. You get your choice of one of three recipes with the Brew Share Enjoy kit—an amber ale, a hefeweizen, and an IPA; this should cover the bases for most craft beer fans. When you’re ready to brew your second batch, you can check out Northern Brewer’s extensive range of recipe kits, see what other shops (like MoreBeer and Austin Homebrew) have to offer, or get right down to designing your own recipes.
All of the recipes you can get with the Brew Share Enjoy kit are extract kits, meaning they come with liquid malt extract (and steeping grains) rather than requiring you to mash grain to extract the sugar. Compared with all-grain brewing, extract brewing is a simple process, so it’s a great way to start. With the addition of a few items, however, the Brew Share Enjoy kit can also be used for all-grain brewing, should you decide to go that route in the future.
Northern Brewer has a staff of dedicated “brewmasters” who are available seven days a week (excluding major holidays) to answer any questions you might have during the brewing process, and in my experience they’re genuinely helpful. You can contact them via text or email, and there’s also a knowledge base (essentially a collection of blog posts) on Northern Brewer’s website that provides an in-depth look at most aspects of brewing. Finally, the company has a no-questions-asked replacement policy should anything go wrong, or if you’re dissatisfied with the quality of the ingredients or equipment you receive. I’ve made use of this policy a couple of times myself, and my interactions with customer service have never been anything less than friendly and efficient.
In general, the items you get in the Brew Share Enjoy kit are similar to those you’d get in competing kits, but there are more of them, and in some cases they’re designed a little better. Just one example: The fermentation and bottling buckets you get are made of the same food-safe HDPE material as those in other kits, but the ones in this kit are translucent rather than opaque, so you can more easily determine the volume of beer inside. It’s this sort of thoughtful design, along with Northern Brewer’s reliable support, that makes the Brew Share Enjoy our go-to kit.
The most glaring omission in this kit is a no-rinse sanitizer, like Star San. Although the Brew Share Enjoy kit comes with an oxygen-based cleanser, it just cleans your gear, rather than sanitizing it. That might be okay for the first use, when everything is fresh from the factory. But once your gear has been used, sanitizing is essential for preventing off-flavors.
As we mentioned above, the kettle that comes with the Brew Share Enjoy kit is nice to have, but it’s one item you may want to upgrade almost right away. Not only is it thin and flimsy, but its handles are uncomfortable to hold when it’s full of hot liquid. Still, the fact that a kettle is included at this kit’s price is a point in Northern Brewer’s favor. And it can be repurposed for cooking or even heating sparge water once its days as a boil kettle are through.
This kit comes with a big, heavy-duty stainless kettle (which you won’t have to replace as soon as you would the ones from cheaper kits), plus a copper immersion chiller and a better fermenter.
For people who are pretty certain they want to dive headfirst into brewing beer, the MoreBeer Premium Home Brewing Kit provides a more durable, flexible, and complete starting point than the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit, albeit at a significantly higher price. For an extra $140 or so, you get an 8½-gallon stainless steel kettle with a ball-valve spigot (in place of the simple 5-gallon kettle) and a wide-mouth, 7-gallon Fermonster fermenter (also with a ball valve) instead of a bucket. Plus, you get a copper immersion chiller, a Star San sanitizer, and everything else our top pick includes. Most of these items are things you’d pick up sooner or later as you progress in the hobby, and getting them up-front as a bundle could save you a significant amount of money (and frustration).
The 8½-gallon kettle that comes with the Premium Home Brewing Kit is both larger and thicker than the 5-gallon kettle you get with the Brew Share Enjoy kit. The larger size is a plus because it lets you perform full-volume boils for 5-gallon batches rather than having to top up once the boil is done. Perhaps more importantly, though, this kettle has a ball valve for easy transfers, which means you’ll be less likely to hurt yourself or spill beer while trying to pour wort into your fermenter. It also has a second port for a dedicated thermometer (not included), which would be useful for monitoring mash and chilling temperatures. At 14 by 14 inches, this kettle is a relatively bulky piece of equipment, but it is still compact enough to use on most full-size gas or electric kitchen ranges (note that it doesn’t work with induction). If you’d prefer to do your brewing outside, you can opt to buy a dedicated propane burner (or repurpose one you already own).
Speaking of chilling, the 25-foot copper immersion chiller is a great addition to this kit. Our top pick doesn’t include one, so its instructions recommend you fill a sink with ice water, plop the kettle inside, and stir your wort in the kettle to chill it. With an immersion chiller, you can circulate cold ground water through the wort instead, chilling more efficiently (and avoiding having to buy ice every time you brew).
The Fermonster fermenter you get with this kit is a small but notable upgrade over the bucket that comes with the Brew Share Enjoy kit. For one thing, it’s made of clear, lightweight PET plastic, rather than translucent HDPE plastic. This is potentially important for two reasons. First, despite being lighter than HDPE, PET is harder and thus more scratch-resistant, meaning it may last longer before needing to be replaced. (Scratches in plastic can harbor unwanted wild yeast and bacteria.) Second, it’s less oxygen-permeable, which means it may protect better against spoilage in beers that spend longer in the fermenter before being bottled. (It’s likely that you’d never notice a difference in most scenarios, but there’s nothing wrong with a little insurance.) And because the fermenter is clear, you can watch fermentation happening, which is really cool (just be sure to keep it out of direct UV light). Like the fermenting bucket in the Brew Share Enjoy kit, the Fermonster has a spigot that allows for easy transfers to the bottling bucket.
The last notable upgrade you get with this kit is a small bottle of Star San, a popular acid-based no-rinse sanitizer. Though the Brew Share Enjoy kit comes with an oxygen-based cleanser, it does not include a sanitizer. That’s fine for brand-new equipment, but once you’ve brewed with your gear, you’re going to want to start sanitizing in addition to cleaning. In other words, this is something you’re going to buy regardless, so it’s nice that this kit includes it.
These four items aside, the gear that comes in the MoreBeer Premium Home Brewing kit is more or less analogous to what you get from Northern Brewer’s kit. Both kits are siphonless. Both come with a thermometer, a hydrometer, bags for hops and specialty grain, transfer tubing, a bottling wand, a bottle capper, bottle caps, and a long stainless spoon.
The Premium Home Brewing Kit comes with your choice of four extract-based recipe kits, including a classic American pale ale, a double IPA inspired by the legendary Pliny the Elder, a hazy IPA, and an amber ale. We’d prefer a bit more variety for those who don’t love hoppy beer. But if you’re looking for something different, it’s easy enough to order another recipe kit or build your own.
Each of these kits comes with detailed instructions (here’s an example in PDF format), as does the equipment kit. And, like Northern Brewer, MoreBeer offers a variety of support options, including toll-free phone support, live chat, email, and a range of how-to articles. In my experience, MoreBeer sometimes takes a bit longer to respond to emails than Northern Brewer, but it’s not a huge difference. MoreBeer’s phone support lines are open Monday through Saturday (compared with Northern Brewer’s seven days a week); this is a small but notable shortcoming since many homebrewers brew on the weekend.
If you just prefer smaller batches, or you’re looking for a low-cost way into the hobby, this 1-gallon kit will make great beer. But you may want to upgrade quickly if you get into the hobby.
If you are on a tight budget, have a very small living space, or just aren’t sure whether you really want to brew your own beer, consider the Northern Brewer Craft Beer Making Kit With Siphonless Fermenter. It’s the best 1-gallon kit we’ve found, and it’ll get you started with brewing for significantly less money than any of our 5-gallon picks. We especially love its siphonless design, with a wide-mouth, 1-gallon fermenter with a spigot that’s easier to clean than typical apple-juice-jug–style small fermenters. Although this one doesn’t come with everything we’d like in our ideal kit (most notably, it’s missing a hydrometer for gravity readings), on the whole this kit makes the brewing process more foolproof than any other 1-gallon option.
One-gallon kits like this one typically don’t come with a lot of the stuff you get in our 5-gallon picks. For example, you don’t get a kettle, since you almost certainly have something in your kitchen already that’s large enough to handle the necessary boil volume (like an 8-quart stock pot or a 6-quart Dutch oven). But you do get almost all the essentials you need to make a (small) batch of beer with minimal stress, including an airlock, a bottling wand and tubing, a bottle capper, bottle caps, oxygen-based cleanser, and even some personalizable beer bottle labels. As with the other kits we recommend, this one doesn’t come with bottles, so you’ll need to either order them separately or save your empties for reuse.
Aside from bottles, the biggest omission here is a hydrometer for testing the sugar content of your wort. But if you follow the instructions well (especially with regard to fermentation times and temperatures), you can probably get away with not testing. And if you’d prefer to be safe rather than sorry, a good hydrometer will cost you only an extra $15 or so. We also don’t love that the fermenter is made of glass, but it’s much less of a liability at this scale than in a 5-gallon kit.
This kit comes with your choice of four recipes: an American brown ale, an Irish red, a Citra pale ale, and an American wheat in the vein of Blue Moon. Each will make around eight to 10 bottles of beer, compared with the couple cases you’d get from our 5-gallon kit recommendations. (That low effort-to-reward ratio is one reason we recommend going for a 5-gallon kit whenever possible.) Like the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit we recommend, this kit comes with Northern Brewer’s excellent customer service via text message and email, seven days a week.
There’s nothing wrong with making beer using extract, as you’ll be doing with all three of our picks. Not only does it reduce the number of steps involved in brewing, potentially shortening your brew day, but it also simplifies recipe-building in several other ways. (For instance, since the grain has already been mashed to make the extract, you don’t have to worry about brewing water chemistry.) Many brewers stick with extract for years, and it’s possible to make excellent beer using both dry and liquid malt extract.
However, there are some compelling reasons to move to all-grain. Specifically, with all-grain you can choose the specific malted and unmalted grains that go into your beer. And there are hundreds to choose from, each contributing its own distinct flavor, aroma, and color to the finished product. You can also control the mash temperature, length, and thickness (ratio of grain to water), all of which are “levers” you can pull to influence your beer’s sweetness and mouthfeel. Whole malt also tends to be fresher than extract, which can make a substantial difference in the finished beer’s taste.
There are many ways to brew all-grain. At the homebrewing level, the most traditional setup is a three-vessel system featuring a mash tun (typically a converted 5- or 10-gallon cooler) and two large kettles (which serve as a hot liquor tank and a boil kettle). This is a time-tested method, but the equipment takes up a lot of space, and those three vessels don’t come cheap.
A simpler, more-cost-effective all-grain method that has become increasingly popular over the past decade is brew-in-a-bag (BIAB). With this method, you mash your grains in a fine-mesh bag that’s placed inside a kettle; when the mash is complete, you simply lift the bag out, let it drain (or squeeze all the liquid out), and then proceed to boil in the same kettle. For your BIAB heat source, you can use your stovetop, a propane burner, or even a portable induction cooktop (assuming your kettle is compatible).
Brülosophy’s Marshall Schott is such a fan of the BIAB method that he suggests newbies skip directly to all-grain brewing. “I’m solidly in the camp who does not believe extract is a necessary starting point,” he told us. “When I recommend gear to folks interested in getting into brewing, it almost always includes a kettle and quality fabric filter.”
If you’re interested in all-grain brewing, the good news is that you can add such a bag to any of the extract kits we recommend, generally for well under $50. Bags from Wilserbrewer and The Brew Bag are popular options among BIAB devotees. The only other item you need to complete your setup is a digital probe thermometer or traditional lab thermometer, to ensure your mash temperature is where you want it.
Another increasingly popular way to get into all-grain brewing is with an all-in-one electric system like those made by Anvil, BrewZilla, and Grainfather. We didn’t test and don’t recommend any of these machines for beginners (mostly due to their high cost). However, I have personally been brewing on an early version of the current BrewZilla design for well over 100 batches, and I find it both easy and enjoyable to use. If your budget allows it, they’re worth looking into as a way to fast-forward your homebrewing journey.
These machines feature a stainless steel kettle and integrated ultra low watt density (ULWD) heating elements paired with a digital temperature controller. The concept is broadly similar to BIAB in that you mash the grains in the same vessel where you boil; the main difference is that you don’t need to monitor mash temperature as closely, since the machine does it for you. Additionally, with these systems, you typically mash in a stainless steel grain basket rather than a cloth bag.
Since these machines rely on electric power, you can brew indoors when it’s cold or rainy outside, unlike with propane-powered three-vessel systems or even larger gas-powered BIAB setups. Compared with that of a three-vessel system, the compact design of these machines means you can more easily store them when not in use, and there are many fewer parts to clean after each brew day. The temperature controllers can be used to program step mashes, and some of the more advanced models can even interact directly with brewing recipe design software to automate every step of the mash, boil, and chilling process.
With all that said, if you decide you’d rather start with an extract-based kit like those we recommend, don’t worry: Upgrading to an electric all-in-one (or some other all-grain setup) down the line won’t render your initial investment worthless. Even though I now use an electric brewer, I started brewing with an older version of the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit we recommend, and I’m still using many of the items that came with it, including the plastic buckets, capper, and bottling wand.
It’s worth repeating: In brewing, sanitation is everything. Always wash, scrub (with a soft sponge), and sanitize your bottling bucket and fermenter after they’ve been used. The same goes for the tubing, siphon, bottle filler, kettle, and anything else that comes into contact with the wort/beer after it’s been boiled. If the kit you’ve purchased doesn’t come with sanitizer (many come only with “cleanser,” which isn’t the same thing), buy some. Once everything has been cleaned, sanitized, and dried, store it someplace dry and covered until you’re ready to use it again. (I usually rinse and re-sanitize just before my next use.)
If you plan on reusing beer bottles—whether commercial or homebrew—make sure you rinse them clean with hot water before storing them, in anticipation of bottling. (If you brew a lot, a FastRack bottle-drying rack is a nice, optional upgrade for used bottle storage.) On bottling day, give them another thorough rinse with tap water followed by a dunk in a bath of sanitizer solution. Using dirty, unsanitized fermenters and bottles is a sure way to ruin an otherwise fine batch of beer.
A lot of the items in your kit will need to be replaced from time to time. Aside from consumables (such as bottles, bottle caps, sanitizer, and muslin grain bags), pieces like vinyl transfer tubing and plastic buckets will eventually acquire scratches and other flaws that warrant replacement. Just use common sense here: When you’re in doubt about the sanitary condition of a given item, go ahead and replace it. Most of these items are cheap anyway, but your beer is precious. Treat it well.
Brewing beer takes a lot of water, but there are steps you can take to mitigate your water consumption, especially while chilling your beer after the boil.
If you have an immersion chiller like the ones that come with several of our kits, you can build a recirculation system (video) that runs the same water through ice several times for quicker cooling. Alternatively, you can upgrade to an even-more-efficient counterflow or plate chiller. Note that these types of chillers have their drawbacks—some require a pricey add-on pump, and all need extra cleanup (which usually means using more water) after you’re done brewing.
Another option is no-chill brewing, a method pioneered in water-conscious Australia, where the wort is put into airtight plastic cubes after the boil and left to cool naturally without the use of ice or cold ground water. If no-chill isn’t an option for you, you can re-use your chilling water rather than letting it run down the drain. Use it to water your lawn, garden, or houseplants, or to top up your pets’ water bowls.
Cleaning also wastes a lot of water, so where possible, try to reuse water when it comes time to clean up after your brew. If you use an immersion chiller, you can use the hot water that comes out of the outlet to clean your spoon and kettle, or you can wash your gear in rainwater collected in a barrel.
Another way to make your brewing more sustainable is to feed your spent grain to livestock or wildlife, or compost it for your garden. (Just be sure to keep hops—even spent ones—away from dogs, since it can be toxic for them.) Reusing bottles (rather than buying new ones for every batch) or switching to kegging reduces glass and plastic consumption, as well.
Finally, even though it’s tempting to buy from online homebrew shops (thanks to their low prices and large selection), we’d recommend patronizing local homebrew shops (aka LHBS) as often as possible—assuming you’re lucky enough to have one. Yes, buying from a local store reduces the number of last-mile deliveries required to bring you equipment and ingredients. In turn, this can cut down on greenhouse gas emissions (though this subject is very complicated). But supporting local homebrew stores is also important for the sustainability of the hobby itself. These stores serve as hubs for a city’s homebrewing community and provide expert advice that can be trickier to find online. They also give you the option of picking up ingredients—like a packet of yeast or a couple ounces of specialty malt—at the last minute, which can make or break a brew day. Speaking as someone whose LHBS recently closed, you really miss them when they’re gone.
If the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy kit is out of stock or costs more when you’re ready to buy: Give the MoreBeer Deluxe Home Brewing Kit a look. In most cases it matches the Brew Share Enjoy kit piece for piece, with a 5-gallon stainless kettle, hydrometer, ported 6-gallon wide-mouth plastic fermenter, and more. It even offers Star San sanitizer, whereas the Brew Share Enjoy doesn’t. And it comes with your choice of four different extract recipe kits, including an American pale ale, an Irish red, an IPA, and a hefeweizen. But this kit is also slightly more expensive most of the time, and we think Northern Brewer’s superior customer service is enough to put it ahead.
If you want to jump right into all-grain brewing with an all-in-one electric setup, but you don’t want to break the bank: Consider the MoreBeer Premium Electric All Grain Home Brewing Kit. This kit is essentially identical to our upgrade pick, except that it’s designed for all-grain brewing and replaces that kit’s 8½-gallon kettle with a 9¼-gallon DigiBoil electric brewer and DigiMash upgrade kit. Like other electric all-in-one brewers, this machine controls mash and boil temperatures using a digital control panel and can be used either indoors or out. It’s available in both 110-volt and 220-volt configurations; the latter can bring your water up to mash temps faster and provide a more-vigorous boil, but it costs a bit more and requires a special NEMA 6-30R outlet. Though not quite as advanced as other electric systems on the market—like the BrewZilla 35L (made by the same manufacturer) or Grainfather G30—this kit is the only option we found that bundles an electric brewing machine with all the essentials needed to get started from scratch. So it’s a good entry point for beginners. (A less-expensive, extract-focused version of the kit without the DigiMash upgrade is also available.)
The Brewer’s Best Beer Brewing Equipment Kit can often be found on sale, but it’s not as complete as our picks, so you’ll have to buy more items separately. Like several other cheap kits, this one is not siphonless, and it doesn’t include a kettle, spoon, or recipe kit. You can do better.
The Craft-A-Brew Catalyst Premium Homebrew Starter Kit uses a unique 6½-gallon conical plastic fermenter with a yeast collection jar, which theoretically allows you to get rid of trub (unwanted sediment), reuse yeast, and bottle clearer beer. However, despite its relatively high price, this kit doesn’t come with a kettle or a lot of other crucial and nice-to-have items, including a hydrometer, airlock, or spoon. We also found lots of user reviews mentioning leaks from bad seals.
The Great Fermentations Basic Brewing Starter Kit relies on an autosiphon, rather than having a siphonless design. And it doesn’t include a kettle, so it’s not as easy to use or as good of a value as our picks.
At around $75 (at the time of writing), the MoreBeer Home Brewing Kit is a decent value, especially since it includes Star San sanitizer and a hydrometer. But it has some significant downsides that led us to prefer the Northern Brewer Brew Share Enjoy. For one thing, this kit doesn’t come with a kettle or a recipe; you can get a kettle and spoon as a $30 upgrade, and a typical 5-gallon extract kit from MoreBeer will cost you about another $30. The fermentation bucket’s lid lacks a gasket, so it’s not airtight, either.
The MoreBeer Premium Home Brewing Kit With Kegging System adds a new 5-gallon keg, a dual-gauge CO2 regulator, and a 5-pound CO2 tank (shipped empty) to our upgrade pick, allowing you to skip the hassle of bottling your beer and jump right into drinking it off the tap. That’s tempting, but the $500 price tag will probably be enough to scare off most rookie homebrewers. In addition, once you’re ready to move to kegging, you’ll likely want a more-elaborate setup than this system provides.
The Northern Brewer Deluxe Homebrew Starter Kit doesn’t come with a kettle and uses glass carboys for fermentation, which are a serious safety risk.
The Northern Brewer Electric Brew Share Enjoy includes a lot of useful items, including a copper immersion chiller and ported wide-mouth plastic fermenters, but its 4.4-gallon Gigawort electric kettle would limit homebrewers to smaller extract batches, or require them to make very concentrated wort and top up for larger batches. We think MoreBeer’s Premium Electric kits provide more flexibility (especially when it comes to moving to all-grain brewing) and will require fewer upgrades over time.
The Northern Brewer Premium Craft Brewery In a Box offers a better kettle than any other kit we’ve seen (our MoreBeer upgrade pick included), and we love that the ported Big Mouth Bubbler plastic fermenter comes with a carrying harness for extra safety. However, this kit’s price will likely be too high for most beginners, and it has a few strange inclusions, like a stainless steel wort chiller instead of the more common (and more efficient) copper.
The William’s Bottling Home Brewery from William’s Brewing isn’t a bad kit, but it comes up short in several areas considering it costs just as much as our top pick. Most notably, there’s no kettle, and the included spoon is plastic rather than stainless steel. However, it does come with more recipe kit options than any other kit we saw—19 of them, to be exact.
The 2-gallon BrewDemon Craft Beer Brewing Kit Signature Pro with Bottles uses a conical plastic fermenter design like the Craft-A-Brew Catalyst 5-gallon kit, but without the yeast collection jar. The fermenter has a wide mouth, which makes it easy to clean, and bottles are included (albeit PET plastic quart-size bottles with screw-on caps). But it’s expensive for a small-volume kit, and there’s no recipe choice—hope you like pilsner!
The BrewDemon kit also comes in a 1-gallon variant. But it lacks many of the extras the 2-gallon version and our 1-gallon pick come with, like an airlock, bottling wand, and spoon. Several user reviews also mention the plastic fermenter arriving broken.
The Brewer’s Best 1 Gallon Brewing Starter Kit comes with some nice extras you don’t often see in small kits, like a hydrometer and a bottle of sanitizer. But while it includes both a 2-gallon primary plastic fermentation bucket and a 1-gallon glass jug intended for secondary fermentations, there’s no bottling bucket. It also costs more than our 1-gallon pick and doesn’t come with a recipe kit, which will cost you another $20 or so.
Brooklyn Brew Shop sells a wide variety of 1-gallon kits, both through its own site and via retailers like Amazon.com. These kits are extremely cheap, which makes them popular as gifts. And they’re all-grain rather than extract, which teaches new brewers some important skills. But we think they’re too limited to be worth it, even at their low price. The equipment here is very old-school, including a 1-gallon glass apple-juice-jug–style fermenter, a racking cane (rather than an autosiphon or a siphonless fermenter), and a glass thermometer. Transfers are a pain, and the bottling process is likely to introduce lots of oxygen. And if you progress in the hobby, you’ll need to throw almost all of this stuff away and start fresh with a larger kit.
The Midwest Supplies Simply Beer 1 Gallon Beer Making Kit has a nice wide-mouth plastic fermenter (we actually prefer it to the glass one that comes with our 1-gallon pick). But it doesn’t include a bottling wand, tubing, or a bottle capper. The kit recommends you “gently flow” the beer directly from the fermenter’s ball-lock valve into PET screw-top bottles, which is a great way to make oxidized beer. Pass.
The MoreBeer 1 Gallon Homebrew Starter Kit doesn’t have a spigot on its fermenter. And although it includes an autosiphon and a bottling wand, there’s no bottling bucket. That means you have to bottle directly from the autosiphon, which is one of the most annoying ways to do it.
This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.
Denny Conn, co-author of Simple Homebrewing and Experimental Homebrewing, interview, February 2022
Sarah Flora, homebrewing YouTuber and host of the Brewing After Hours podcast, interview, February 2022
Marshall Schott, creator of homebrewing science site Brülosophy and host of the Brülosophy podcast, interview, February 2022
John Palmer, author of How to Brew, interview
Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association, interview
Ben Holmes, co-founder of Aeronaut Brewing Co., interview
Mike Smith, brewery director at Aeronaut Brewing Co., interview
Ben Keough is the supervising editor for Wirecutter's working from home, powering, cameras, and hobbies and games coverage. He previously spent more than a decade writing about cameras, printers, and other office equipment for Wirecutter, Reviewed, USA Today, and Digital Camera HQ. After four years testing printers, he definitively confirmed that they all suck, but some suck less than others.
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Semi Automatic Beer Bottle Filling Machine Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).