How to brew Coopers Original Stout at home

What you're brewing

Coopers Original Stout is a 1.7kg tin of hopped malt extract, so the hop side of the beer is already decided for you and what you're really doing is choosing the fermentable, keeping the temperature honest and not rushing the bottling. Coopers describe what comes out of it as a dark brown stout with a head like espresso crema, coffee and chocolate and grain on the nose, dark malt through the middle, and a dry finish that comes from the malt tannins pushing against the hop bitterness. They also say it's good young or cellared for years, which is unusual for a kit beer and worth knowing before you drink the lot in a fortnight.

Sanitise first, and properly

Everything the beer touches after the boil has to be sanitised, so that's the fermenter, the lid, the airlock, the tap, the spoon, the hydrometer and the test jar, and later on every bottle and cap. This is the step that decides whether you get a stout or a science experiment, and it's also the step people get slack about on batch number four when nothing has gone wrong yet. A no rinse sanitiser is the easy way to do it.

The fermentable is where you actually make a decision

The kit tells you to add a kilo of something fermentable and this is the one choice that changes the beer. Plain dextrose gives you the alcohol and leaves the stout leaner than most people want. Brew Enhancer 3 is the middle answer, and Coopers aim it at fuller beers with the malt character forward, which describes a stout exactly. Dark malt extract is the biggest of the three, because it brings roast and colour of its own on top of the body, and if you've had a kit stout come out thinner than the picture in your head, that's the swap to make.

Mixing and pitching

Stand the tin in hot water for a few minutes so it pours instead of sitting in a lump, stir it into hot water with your fermentable until it's properly dissolved, then top up with cold water to your batch volume. Take a hydrometer reading now, because you can't work out what the beer did later if you never wrote down where it started. Pitch the yeast once the wort is in the temperature range the instructions on your kit give you, and follow that range rather than a number off the internet, because it is printed there for this yeast.

Temperature, which matters more than anything else you'll do

Yeast makes flavour as well as alcohol, and how warm it was while it worked decides most of what you end up tasting. Steady is worth more than perfect. A cool cupboard that stays put beats a warm laundry that swings 10 degrees between the afternoon and 4am, and a beer fermented too warm comes out with a solventy or a banana edge that no amount of conditioning will take back out. Stout is a bit kinder here than a lager, because roast covers a multitude of sins, which is one good reason to make it your second ever batch.

Knowing when it's done

The airlock is not the test. It goes quiet long before the yeast has finished and it can bubble away merrily because the room warmed up. The test is the hydrometer, and the beer is finished when you get the same reading two days apart. Two identical readings, not one that looks about right. This is the single most common reason a bottle turns into a grenade in the cupboard.

Bottling

Sanitise the bottles, add your priming sugar or carbonation drops, fill leaving a little headspace, and seal them. Then leave them somewhere warm for a couple of weeks to carbonate, because the yeast still has work to do and it won't do it cold. After that they can go in the fridge. Chill one, pour it hard enough to build the head, and have a look at whether it holds the way Coopers say it should.

Drink it now or put it away

This is one of the few kits where cellaring is genuinely on the table, so if you brew a batch it's worth putting a few bottles at the back of a cupboard and forgetting about them. A stout gets its character from roast rather than from strength, so a young one is perfectly good, and an old one is a different beer rather than a better one.

If you want the general method rather than this particular tin, we've written that up separately, and it's linked below. Ask us when you're in the shop if you get stuck on any of it.

Shop related products

• Coopers Original Stout 1.7kg. The kit this post is about. Dark brown, coffee and chocolate, dry finish.
• Coopers Brew Enhancer 3 1kg. The fermentable Coopers point at fuller beers, so the safe pick for a stout.
• Coopers Dark Malt Extract 1.5kg. The bigger swap, for more body and more roast.
• Coopers Dextrose 1kg. Alcohol without body, if you want the stout leaner.
• S-04 Safale Ale Yeast 11.5g. An ale yeast worth having on hand if you'd rather choose your own.

Did you know a fair bit of the stout side of the shop never made it onto the website. There's the Coopers International Series Irish Stout tin, a Mangrove Jack's Irish stout, a Black Rock stout, and the Brewblend stout booster and Irish stout blends. The bottling gear is in the shop too, so hydrometers and test jars, crown seals, hammer and bench cappers, carbonation drops, PET bottles and caps. Give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf.

The rest is in our homebrew collection, and Brewhilder will walk you through a batch if you'd rather ask as you go.

More from the homebrew blog

• How to brew your own stout at home, the general method
• How to brew Coopers Original Dark Ale
• What fermentation actually does, and how to keep yeast happy

I am still the person who takes a hydrometer reading and then takes it again because I don't trust the first one.

Cheers,

Candeece