The Best Beer to Start Brewing

For Christmas or for your last birthday your wife/parents/kids bought you a homebrew kit. Maybe you treated yourself to that collection of the odd assortment of equipment: a bucket, a kettle, a thermometer, a hydrometer, maybe a couple of carboys. You want to brew a beer.

You love beer. You especially love that Pale Ale brewed at your local brewpub or that Kölsch brewed at the microbrewery just down the street. You want to make beer that tastes as good as that, or better. You know you can do it. You are all psyched up for that first brew day. You've read Papazian; you've read Palmer (twice); you've digested Brew Chem 101. You are ready to make your first batch.

For a minute or two you contemplate making some Goat Scrotum Ale just so you can hand your buddy a bottle and say, "Here suck on some Goat Scrotum," but you start to think you need a better reason to pick a recipe than the potential for beer-belly laughs from your mates -- you're going to make 40 pints of this stuff after all and you want it to be good. What should you brew?

This is the situation one of my friends is in. He's trying to make up his mind about what he should brew first. His wife bought him a kit a month or so ago and he is going to make his first batch of extract brew. "What should I brew?" he asked.

My first thought was to answer, "Whatever you want to brew. It's your beer. You're going to have to drink it."

Then I realized that what he was asking was if there are certain beers or styles that are simpler to brew than other, styles suited for the newbie -- something that was sure to come out. The truth is that there is no magically simpler beer to brew. At the extract level all your brews are going to be pretty much at the same difficulty and will have an equal probability of turning out just fine as long as you are careful, pay attention to sanitation issues, and avoid splashing your beer around too much when you move it from the fermenter to the bottle.

Extract kits are available for just about every beer style you can think of, so the beer world is yours. You just have to make up your mind.

I went into a local homebrew shop the other day and the owner had laid out two full shelves of display -- row after row of extract kits. One was labeled "Newcastle Nut Brown Ale." Another was labeled "Sierra Nevada Pale Ale". And another labeled "Guinness Stout." These "clone" kits were clearly being pitched at the novice brewer who's first inclination is to brew their favorite commercial beer or something that approximates it at least.

My first brew was a "Newcastle Nut Brow Ale" kit. That first brew day gave me lots of problems. I didn't have everything I needed in the way of equipment to do the brew and I was pulling stuff out of the kitchen cabinets to kludge together what I needed. I couldn't get my siphon started to move the wort to the kettle and I was sure that I had infected the whole batch by sucking on the end of the siphon hose (out of desperation).

That "Nut Brown Ale" turned out okay. It was drinkable. But it didn't have anything to do with "Newcastle Nut Brown Ale". It wasn't even the same color.

If you want to start by brewing a clone of a commercial beer, then that's fine. It's your beer. However, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. Your extract clone isn't going to taste exactly like that commercial beer you love so much. If you start comparing your first extract beer to that commercial ideal, you might get discouraged. Not that your beer will be bad. It might be a damn fine and tasty beer, but if you have expectations about hitting a certain mark set by a commercial standard, then your expectations need readjustment.

The number one reason that brewers stop brewing their own beer is because of discouragement and disappointment. This applies to the veteran brewers as much as the novice brewers. If you make a couple of batches of beer that you don't like, then it gets harder and harder to motivate yourself to do another brew. If you are a first time brewer, it's especially important that that first effort be a success; that you make a beer that you can be proud of and one that you'll be happy to drink 40 pints of.

This is why I told my friend that he should pick a style of beer that he likes and just make a beer as opposed to making "a clone" of a commercial beer.

"I really like Sam Adams Boston Lager," my friend said.

"You can buy gallons of Sam Adams Boston Lager," I said. "Why would you want to brew it?"

Which brings me to my second bit of advice: you might want to consider brew something that you can't buy a lot of easily.

If you live in the US, you will have ready access to a commercial example of just about every beer style ever dreamed of and more, so it might be a challenge coming up with a short list of rare or expensive commercial beers that fit into this category.

One of the standard beers that I make in my home brewery is a Session Saison. Now I love Saisons. My idea of a beautiful afternoon is sipping a bottle of (unskunked) Saison Dupont while reading a good novel. But sometimes I want the taste of a Saison without having to commit to 750 ml at nearly 7.0% ABV. So I formulated a Session Saison that comes in at around 4.0% ABV. I can drink a couple of pints of my Session Saison and still be fit to do other things. As far as I know there are no commercial examples of a Session Saison, at least I can't buy any in my local beer store. My Session Saison is also a very popular beer with my friends. For most of them its the first taste of really fresh Saison style beer they've ever had -- and they can drink three pints of it and still be standing.

Maybe you aren't comfortable experimenting with your very first batch, but if you do want to brew your favorite Pale Ale just make sure that you go into tasting that first batch with realistic expectations. Once you've demonstrated to yourself that you can make great beer -- beer that you enjoy and want to drink -- then you can start working on hit the mark set by a commercial standard.