Before I get lynched, let me explain. My wife really enjoyed all but 2 of the kit beers I made. These were the Bulldog Bad Cat (too much alcohol, not enough other flavour, so unbalanced even for her) and the hugely tweaked Wilko's Cerveza (she liked this to begin with, then it turned out that that pellicle really WAS an infection thanks to a loose fitting lid on the FV, which was why it had a strange sweet and funky flavour). I just have a really sensitive sense of taste. The only kit brew that I came close to enjoying was when I did a tweaked Wilko's Golden Ale (dry hopped with 25g Citra, 25g Amarillo, 25g Falconer's Flight, brewed with 1kg of light DME and 500g dextrose). The Youngs AIPA was almost ok, except I suffered crippling migraine headaches after drinking it, and it falls off a cliff 4 weeks after you bottle it and tastes revolting after this. Everything else just had too much kit twang, and in the case of Werry was just ridiculously meh. It never really tasted like actual beer, more like an attempt to simulate beer, and I include the golden ale in this. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with kits, or that it's not real brewing etc, just that they're not for me, and that I bet there are other people out there the same. So if somebody starts to suspect they might be the same as me, they're best using the money (so called premium kits are darned expensive in home brewing terms!) to get themselves started in all grain via BIAB, assuming they have the time to invest that is.
As to leftovers, a fair bit of the spent grain I produce gets used to make dog biscuits (our pups love them, as do many of our friends dogs). The rest goes into the composter, along with the used hops and trub out of the boiler. The biggest proportion of waste is actually water from cooling the wort after the boil, which some brewers get around by doing no chill brewing. I showed my wife plate chillers as these are supposed to be faster, but she blanched at the price of these. lol Last time I brewed, quite a lot of the water from my IC went to topping up my pond and watering various plants in our back garden. It was scorching hot weather, the pond water level had dropped tons, and the plants were very thirsty. I even re-used the yeast cake once, doing 2 brews off 1 packets of MJ Liberty Bell... lol Thing as well is, where do you thing the malt extract in the can/pouch comes from? Wonder if Muntons/Coopers/Youngs make dog biscuits too?
Let me just make it clear, there is NOTHING wrong with making beer from kits, if you LIKE the beer it produces. I personally don't is all, so was making a humorous observation about how I struggled to make good beer with kits, but found it super easy (apart from the physical labour) to make really nice beer with grain. Do I think my beer is better than kit beer? Too ruddy right! Do I think that making beer from kits is proper brewing? Not really, no. If you buy bake your own rolls in a supermarket, you don't go calling yourself a baker....:p IF you are tweaking kits etc. then yeah, you're on the path to proper brewing for sure. I once made a wine kit up, it produced a delicious wine. I'm most definitely NOT a vintner...
I'm a bloke who made a wine kit up once.
I'm glad I didn't like kit beer, it FORCED me to explore all grain brewing, and to embrace it completely as a craft. I don't do it to save money on beer, I do it as a hobby, to see what I can achieve. This never would have been the case with kits, and I probably would have gotten bored eventually.
I could also taste the difference between the same beer primed with dextrose and with sucrose, and hated the ones primed with sucrose. The one primed with sucrose tasted like somebody had poured a splash of cheapo cider into it.
I cop flack when I tell people this too. Why can't people just accept that I can taste things that maybe they can't? I can't stand celery or marmite either, but my wife likes them both.....
If you think this is snobbery, feel free to point and call me a snob, I won't be offended.
Not saying this is true for everybody though, hence I said if after a couple of kits....
I went through a LOT, and regretted spending so much!!!! The money I spent on kits I could have afforded something like a Brew Devil probably (had it of existed back then... lol The ACE did, but well...)....
