I mostly brew from 3kg pouch extract kits (Festival, Mangrove Jacks). These I've found to be top quality kits which include dry hops where appropriate. Some in range also include additional dextrose for higher target ABV, and include enough additional priming dextrose for carbonation appropriate to style.
If you are meticulous regarding sanitation, manage temp and timing (testing progress with hydrometer), follow previous advice regarding patience and importance of allowing brew to condition, results from these kits are excellent.
+1 to advice offered so far. Here's my top dozen tips from my own personal experience...
1. Get an auto-syphon. There are others, but Fermtech kit has been reliable for me. This, combined with use of their bottling wand, massively improves the whole bottling process. (Cost is about £20 for both).
2. A Fermtech "thief" (cost about £10) used instead of a sample jar greatly simplifies gravity testing. Hydrometer placed inside "thief" when taking samples allows for quicker and more sanitary SG testing. 150ml samples of beer within sanitised "thief" can be returned to FV after measurement, less the obligatory cheeky sample "wee dram" for tasting, improving yield to bottles further down the line.
3. I've found racking from FV to a dedicated bottling bucket, and then bulk priming in that (with dextrose powder rather than carbonation tabs) saves cost and further smooths bottling process. Bulk priming allows flexibility in levels of carbonation to suit different beer styles. Just remember to ensure priming solution is properly stirred in and without splashing. (Hydrometer measurement can check this - "thief" will mostly pull test sample from bottom. So, if priming solution not properly mixed in, then sample will register much higher gravity than the expected 1-2 points higher than FG of brew measured when in FV).
4. If dry hopping your brews, then syphoning with any kit, whether bulk priming or directly into bottles, can become a bit of a ball ache. There's a whole world of grief in trying to avoid trub and hops debris from clouding your final packaged brew. Transfer flow rates get sluggish. Tubes get blocked. CO2 comes out of solution. Syphons need to be re-primed. Stress levels and worry about ruining a brew through infection or oxidation become heightened!
5. Even use of small nylon muslin-type filter sock (which are included in Festival kits to try to alleviate problem) didn't always work for me. It was regularly THE most challenging part of the whole brewing and bottling process, with constant blockages impeding otherwise smooth transfer from FV to bottling bucket.
6. That is - it was - until I bought a stainless steel 300 micron mesh hop spider! (Cost £5-£20 depending on size). This investment was, for me, an absolute game changer! Worth every penny in alleviating bottling process stress.
7. I still dry hop without it. In that any dry hopping cones/pellets are chucked into the FV bucket loose as before. But when racking the final brew into my bottling bucket, I now hook the spider onto the lip of the open FV brew bucket and syphon the settled brew from inside the hop spider mesh cylinder.
8. The large surface area mesh of the spider never blocks, and flow rate of transfer is now much much faster. I unhook the spider towards the end of the transfer, resting the bottom of it gently onto the sediment as I tilt the FV to allow the syphon to get to the bottom of the clear settled and undisturbed brew.
9. What was an occasionally challenging process is now reliably straight forward. Racking a 23 litre brew into my bottling bucket now takes me as little as 2 minutes to transfer all but the last 200ml of trub and hops, delivering reliably clear brew into my bottling bucket and minimising the chance of oxidation in the process.
10. I had originally considered putting taps on all my FVs and my bottling bucket. But the above kit (auto-syphon, bottling wand, and spider) has now made the regular racking/bottling job so much easier, and the process now so smooth, that I cannot see how taps on my buckets would further improve it. The cost saving from not using taps on my FVs pays for the auto-syphon and hop spider, and installation of taps would otherwise necessitate having another item to clean and maintain to avoid potential for leaks and infection.
11. Make good use of the kit you probably don't realise you already have! If bottling in a kitchen equipped with a dishwasher, the opened door of said appliance makes for a surprisingly convenient and easily cleaned large drip-tray platform to be used when filling your bottles!
12. Pretreat your water. Albeit my local South Yorks tap water is pretty good to start with, pretreating it with Campden tabs has made a surprisingly noticeable difference to the quality of my brews - even though only brewing from extract kits (i.e. no mash). Half a crushed Campden tab in 23 litres of tap water (in my bottling bucket) left for a few minutes before kicking off a kit has eliminated any off-flavours from residual chloramine. The auto-syphon, once again, coming into its own to transfer the treated tap water into FV from bottling bucket (repurposed as liquor tank).
Of course each to their own, and everybody's preferred kit and process will be slightly different. However this, over dozens of brews, is what I've found works best for me.
Hope you find above useful!
but mostly because you get a little sediment in the bottom of your bottles.
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