I see more beer has some kits they are calling flash Brew kits. They require no boil, looks like they use some specially processed DME and they have some hop extract I guess, along with your regular flavor, Aaoma and dry hops. Caught my eye because the kit they were making in the video is one of my favorites, Citra session Pale Ale. The idea sounds pretty cool. I’ll be curious to see what some of the reviews are like. I would have figured by now somebody here would have tried one. I know they’re new but I’ve been hearing about it for a couple of months without really looking at what it was. They’ve got quite a few kits.
Futher, assume that there will be people who start with these kits and want to move on to “the next level”.
There appear to be a couple of meaningful differences between the Flash Brewing™ kits and common approaches to brewing with DME/LME (e.g. clear bottles vs brown bottles).
Looking at the kit ingredients: little of it was available to the American HomeBrew market 50 years ago. The ‘Hop Bite’ syringe, Citra hops, ‘Flash’ yeast (Kviek?). All recent developments.
One day, you’ll wake up and there won’t be anymore time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Don’t wait. Do it now.
That’s what I wonder about. If you watched the video, Vito didn’t try to say this is outstanding beer, but, reading between the lines, I think what he meant was this isn’t bad beer and takes virtually no time and effort.
I agree, several components are things I’ve never used before. In fact, most.
I guess my only real hangup is over any contamination that rides in on your ingredients. I’m guessing it depends on a combination of “sanitize your stuff” and “hit this thing with enough yeast that they’ll out compete everything”.
It’s not for me as it’s not what I enjoy about brewing, but if it serves to get someone fermenting beer, I cheer for it.
It does appear to me that the big innovations are the small packaged dose of isomerized bittering extract / hop oils and I would guess Kveik as well.
thinking again tho. imagine a kit/setup to get an incredibly fast -start of brewing process to finished product. i bet you could get it all done and the beer reasonably fermented in ~36 or 48 hours?
ie. from a standing start
-no-boil extract kit with hops, mix, aerate dump in carboy. - 1 hour in
-add active liquid kviek yeast at 95F. - 1 hour 5 mins in
-your blowofftube explodes, spraying krausen everywhere - 3 hours in
-increase temp to ~110F 6 hours in
24 hour mark - cold crash it
-keg and carb at overpressure - at 30 hours
These kits are perfect for the people who like having relatively cheap craft beer at home but don’t like brewing. It’s just add water brewing.
It makes all kinds of sense to lure people back into brewing who gave it up because they don’t have the time to burn a weekend day brewing and cleaning. It’s not for most of us who enjoy brewing and have the time to dedicate to it.
I do extract brews every so often either because I’m short on time and need to get something in the pipeline, or maybe I’m testing something out that doesn’t need a full mash. The option to go no-boil is really appealing to me, to be honest. I just wish I could get the raw ingredients to build my own recipes from this. And to be honest, I think it would just be the iso-AA extract that I can’t get my hands on easily in a size that is appropriate for my uses. Otherwise, it’s just DME, dry yeast, and dry hops - all of which I keep on hand.
It would be cool if they sold their HopBite a la carte. I can’t justify $40-50 for a 5-gallon kit that I only want to brew 3 gallons of, and only need one ingredient from.