'Pail' Ale
Grain Bucket 4L 'Pail' Ale Beer Kit
Everything you need to make 4 Litres of our 'Pail' Ale craft beer at home - even if you've never brewed before!
Kit Includes:
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About
This was the first beer we shared with the world and it's delicious. It's a based on the Pale Ale style making it a good place to begin if you're starting out and a great choice for all occasions.
The name is a cheeky play on words. A 'pail' is a type of bucket typically used in shipping. When we started shipping buckets of ingredients to make pale ale beer, it naturally became our 'Pail' Ale...
Our recipe makes a delicious 'session beer'. It's fairly dry, but with a full mouthfeel and a subtle biscuit aftertaste with a possible slight hint of caramel. It’s slightly more bitter than commercial beer, with a citrus/red-berry hop, but not overpoweringly so.
Our ingredients have been specifically chosen to create something familiar to the South African beer drinker but, given the effort you’re putting in, something more substantial than what you buy in bulk at the store.
The method described in our recipe may result in a beer with a slightly darker orange colour than you’re used to, but this has little bearing on the flavours that are characteristic of this style of beer - which is traditionally brewed to a lighter colour.
Your first batch (or tenth :) may not come out exactly as we designed the beer, but as long as you don’t contaminate your beer while making it, you will make a very satisfying, tasty beer. Trust us. We’ve tried brewing a number of test batches as badly as we could, just to see how badly we could mess up, and every time we still made good beer. Our recipe gives detailed information on things that change the beer - feel free to try the things that appeal to you and craft the beer you want.
What's in the Kit
Short answer: everything you need for your beer that you don't already have in your kitchen. For the items you
need from your kitchen, check the top of the recipe page.
The rest of this page has the long answer.
Specific to Our 'Pail' Ale
Speciality Malt
About a twelfth of the grain in the kit is a light caramel malt made from quality spring barley by German malting house Weyermann. This improves the 'head retention' of your beer (so that you get that satisfying white foam at the top of every glass) and improves the beer's 'mouth feel' while imparting a very subtle caramel flavor that kicks your beer up a notch from the commercial stuff you buy in the bottlestore.
All our grain is freshly milled just before shipping to help you make the best beer possible. Your Speciality Malt will be delivered already mixed in with your Pale Malt and Flaked Corn
South African Hops (Yellow Dot)
Hops is what gives beer its bitterness. We use a South African variety of hops that imparts a clean, smooth bitterness with subtle hints of red berry, citrus and wood.
As with our choice of Pale Malt, this choice of hops will be very familiar to you if you've had any of a variety of local Craft Beers
This hops is packaged with a yellow dot on the bag
Flaked Corn
Flaked corn is included in our recipe as an Adjunct Grain. It makes up a similar weight to the Speciality Malt to further give your beer a full body and mouth feel. "But corn in my beer?" we hear you ask. Next time you are in the store, you'd be surprised how many commercial beers include 'maize' on their list of ingredients. This adjunct grain is commonly used in Ales as well as American Lagers
Your Flaked corn will arrive pre-milled and mixed in with your Pale and Speciality Malt
In All Kits
All of our 4L Kits contain the following items
Pale Malt
Pale malted barley makes up the majority of most Craft Beers. Our Pale Malt is locally grown and malted by South Africa's very own SAB Maltings. Malting is the a process whereby raw barley is prepared for beer making by starting its germination process to break down proteins and foster enzymes. These enzymes will help convert starches into fermentable sugars that will ultimately put the alcohol in your beer.
This choice of Pale Malt wil give you a beer that you're already very familiar with. All our grain is freshly milled just before shipping to help you make the best beer possible
Brewer's Yeast
Our kits contain a specially engineered brewing yeast that is guaranteed to make a far better beer than
that baker's stuff you get at the supermarket.
In more technical terms, our choice of yeast has a high 'attenuation'. This means
that it's able to covert most of the sugars into alcohol giving you that 'dry' taste you expect from beer.
It has a low 'ester production', so it doesnt make those weird banana/bubblegum flavours.
It also has good flocculation, which means that it doesnt remain suspended in your beer after fermentation thus
giving you a clearer beer.
Priming Sugar
No one wants to drink flat beer. We include a carefully measured amount of dextrose priming sugar to add to your beer just before bottling. This additional priming sugar with continue to ferment in the sealed bottles for a couple of days, releasing CO2 and naturally self-carbonating your beer without making an explosive mess on your ceiling :)
Dextrose is chosen as it is highly 'bio-available' resulting in fast natural carbonation without altering the taste of your beer
No-rinse Sanitizer
The most important part of making your own beer is keeping out any microbes or wild yeast. This ensures that all of the fermentable sugars are consumed by your brewers yeast and not something else that will produce 'off flavours'. As long as you keep everything sterile, you'll make good beer.
To help with this, we include a 50ml sachet of a concentrated, SABS Approved, no-rinse sanitizer that is specially formulated for the food industry to not leave a residue once it dries. This is the 'purple' sachet pictured to the right. If you still have an older kit with a bottle of clear sanitizer, see the [Show More] block below.
You will need sanitizer on both Brew Day and Bottling Day. The new sachets of sanitizer are very stable, so either you can mix half the concentrate on either day (storing the open sachet in a sealed container in between) or you can even mix the full amount and store the diluted mixture to use both days. We recommend the first option. The 50ml sachet should be diluted with 10L to 20L of water (10L as described on the packaging, is for 'soiled surfaces', so given that everything is already clean when your are brewing, you can mix up to 20L is it is easier for you)
This sanitizer in the purple sachet is highly concentrated. Dilute before handling. Avoid contact with concentrate and wash immediately and thoroughly with water after accidental skin or eye contact with the concentrate. Flush eyes thoroughly with water if contaminated and consult a doctor. Do not ingest. Keep out of reach of children and animals.
Once correctly diluted it is relatively safe to get on your hands but will cause drying of the skin.
Should you need to seek medical assistance, the purple concentrate is approximately 17% Quartenary Ammonium Compounds (QACs).
In earlier versions of our kits, we used to include a different sanitizer packaged as 25ml of clear liquid in a 50ml clear plastic bottle. This no-rinse sanitizer is incredibly effective but was a little more difficult to handle as it needed to be store out of direct sunlight and would build up pressure in the bottle (sometimes causing leaks).
If you still have one of these old kits, congratulations - we just dont make sanitizer like we used to ;) Mix half of the bottle (at a rate of 2-3ml per 1 litre of water) to use on Brew Day and save the second half for Bottling Day
Bottle of clear sanitizer is highly concentrated. Dilute before handling. Avoid contact with concentrate and wash immediately and thoroughly with water after accidental skin or eye contact with the concentrate. Flush eyes thoroughly with water if contaminated and consult a doctor. Do not ingest. Keep out of reach of children and animals. Keep out of direct sunlight.
Once correctly diluted it is relatively safe to get on your hands but will cause drying of the skin.
Should you need to seek medical assistance, the clear concentrate in the bottle is approximately 45% Hydrogen Peroxide and 20% Peracetic Acid and is thus a strong acid with corrosive, oxidizing, anti-microbial agents
Beeswax
During the mashing step of brewing, you need to achieve very specific temperatures in order to facilitate the enzymes in the malt converting starch into fermentable sugars.
Our kit leverages an ancient brewing technique that relies on the fact that beeswax melts around this perfect temperature. We thus include a couple of beeswax pellets to help you hit the right temperature. Of course if you have access to a good thermometer you can use that too - albeit with less 'craft'. You also have twice as many pellets as you need, in case you mess up.
Tube (Airlock and Siphon)
We include a length of tube in the kit that fulfills two purposes.
For the first case, fermentation produces a lot of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) gas. You want to let this CO2 out of the fermentor while not letting any oxygen in. Yeast needs to respire anaerobically (i.e. without oxygen) to produce alcohol. Our solution is to insert the one end of the tube into the hole in the top of the fermentor and put the other end in a glass of water to create a one-way airlock
In the second case, you want to gently transfer your beer into your bottles without introducing air into it. This is needed in order to keep your beer fresh. You can use this same tube to siphon the beer out of fermentor without creating any bubbles
5L Fermentor
This is the bucket for your grain!
Our kit is shipped in a 5 litre food-safe bucket that can be used to ferment your beer. It has a hole in the lid to insert your airlock
Grain Bucket 4L 'Pail' Ale Beer Kit
Everything you need to make 4 Litres of our 'Pail' Ale craft beer at home - even if you've never brewed before!
Kit Includes:
About
