I know very little about brewing beer and I lack patience. So when I received a Mr. Beer kit as a gift , I thought, Yay! I will never use this! I wonder what I could get for it for on craigslist? Turns out not much, so I reluctantly gave it a shot.

And I mean reluctantly. If you’re like me, you love to drink good beer but have no real itch to make it, even with the kit that has been in the closet for two years. And you’d rather someone gave you $50 of good beer than a $50 kit that requires a bit of planning, preparation and work.

If that’s the case, then my experience with this kit should give you an idea what it’s like to make your own beer if you are not particularly motivated to do so.

THE KIT
The kit I received was the Mr. Beer Gold Beer Kit, which is about as easy as beer making kits get, so we’re still safe.
The kit includes
2-gallon fermenter
2 refills—Aztec Mexican Cerveza (sic) and Grand Bohemian Czech Pilsner (each refill includes hopped malt extract (HME), dry brewing yeast and no-rinse cleanser)
Bottles, caps and labels
Printed instructions
DVD instructions

I started with the DVD (also on youtube, so you can watch it on your smarty pants computer-phone). It did the job—it was brief and informative, and the narrator* is pretty likeable, although I got the sense that when he drank the results, he was making it look like it tasted a lot better than it did. We’ll get to that.
*Peter Gariepy, Mr. Beer’s Customer Service Manager

PREP WORK
I cleared off as much counter space as I felt like (not much), laid out the instructions, put a singularly insipid DVD (not the instructional DVD) in to occupy the kids, and commenced getting this over with.

The part that I was most concerned about was getting everything sterile enough. If your only knowledge of homebrewing was gleaned from a couple of online reviews of this kit, that will be the primary takeaway. To that end, the kit comes with some no-rinse cleanser that you mix with water. You use half for the fermenter, then half later when you rinse the bottles. You might wonder at some point how sterile this or that piece is, but if you’re attentive and careful, it will be fine, even without being pathologically obsessed about keeping everything surgically sterile.

Once everything was sterile, making the batch was easy. I chose the pilsner for my virgin voyage, so I boiled water and poured the hopped malt extract in and stirred. I then poured that into the fermenter, stirred it with what I hoped was a sterile spoon, put the lid on and stowed it in a cooler on top of my fridge.

BOTTLING
After a few weeks of not even thinking about it, it was time to bottle. As with the previous step, the part I was most concerned about was sterilization. It took me as long to sterilize the bottles as it did to scoop the sugar in and fill them, but it was still another easy step. And that’s the good thing about brewing a small batch of beer like this—the work is spread out, so by the time you’re done, it doesn’t seem like it was that much effort. I stowed the bottles and waited again.

After a few weeks, I put the bottles in the fridge for cold conditioning and waited the minimum recommended time according to the instructions.

MOMENT OF TRUTH
Because this was my first batch, I was expecting that the beer wouldn’t taste good. I was pleasantly surprised. I wouldn’t say it tasted good, but it wasn’t bad. I am sure I did not have the same smile on my face that Peter Gariepy did when he took a sip in the video. But I have had worse, and I learned a thing or two.

I have since brewed my second batch—the cerveza, which was not particularly good. My problem with both batches were that they were a little cidery. Not dumpably so, and some bottles more than others, but it was noticeable enough to think that I had wasted my time. Maybe I didn’t measure the sugar accurately, I don’t know. I have not seen any favorable reviews of the pilsner or cerveza styles, but I suppose they are good for the practice batches.

I am going to try one more batch—the Northwest Pale Ale. If that’s no good, Mr. Beer’s headed to craigslist. Stay tuned.