Ancient Kit

[phildodd]

Hello all, so my parents used to brew when they were first married (I guess that's about 30 years ago now) because they were too poor to buy beer. Unfortunately they sold all their equipment off a few years before i decided I wanted to start so I couldn't use their stuff, oh well! Anyway, the other day I was back home helping my Dad 'build a summer house' (watch the Grand Prix) and he gave me an old can of Boots Bitter he'd found lying around. There's no way of telling how old this thing actually is, but the can seems sound so I'm tempted to try brewing it up.

Two questions:
1) Is this stupid?
2) Is there anythign I should/can do to counter the fact that it is ancient?
3) This is a one can kit, so I assume that I'll be adding 1kg of suger/spraymalt/whatever, is this right (the instructions for this kit are long lost)?

cheers all!

[thedistiller]

All you need is a new yeast and 1 kg of sugar and it should be fine

[Normski]

Hi Phil
I've heard of people brewing old tins of Boots Bitter and it being fine. As the distiller says, you'll need to replace the yeast. But I’d use 1 kg of medium spray malt instead of the sugar. Cheers

[AlexCricket]

You may want to consider adding some 'hop tea' to the brew as it is the hoppiness that is most likely to have deteriorated with age - but up to you, you may not like hop!

[Lillywhite]

You'll find that the brew will be very very dark with a kit that old. It will look like brown ale.

[phildodd]

Thanks guys, will be putting it on after the next brew.

You may want to consider adding some 'hop tea' to the brew as it is the hoppiness that is most likely to have deteriorated with age - but up to you, you may not like hop!

I heard this from somewhere else too, how would I use this hop tea stuff? Muntons do a hopped spraymalt, would this give enough extra hoppiness?

Also, should I use 1kg of Spraymalt or 50/50 spraymalt and brewing sugar?

Cheers all!

[Matt24]

Hop tea can be made easily by boiling 50-100g of hops contained in a straining bag, piece of muslin or even a stocking in about a gallon of water and then you just add this to the contents of the can in the FV. Basically you are making a giant hop "tea bag". This should be boiled for about an hour to get max utilisation from the hops.

By the way, the house will smell like a brewery whilst boiling hops!

[jonewer]

Hop tea can be made easily by boiling 50-100g of hops contained in a straining bag, piece of muslin or even a stocking in about a gallon of water and then you just add this to the contents of the can in the FV. Basically you are making a giant hop "tea bag". This should be boiled for about an hour to get max utilisation from the hops.

By the way, the house will smell like a brewery whilst boiling hops!

Be aware though that boiling hops for an hour will give you bitterness but no flavour or aroma.

For flavour boil a portion for 15 mins and for aroma, just let them stew when the heat is off for about 15-30mins.

There is nothing quite so heavenly as the heady aroma of boiling hops.... makes me want to put another brew on just for the sake of it!

[phildodd]

As an update, I put this kit on today with 1kg of dark spraymalt (ordered by mistake, didn't care enough about this brew to wait for some pale to turn up). Didn't bother with the hopping in the end for some reason (laziness probably) so we'll see how it goes.

The only thing giving me (extreme) doubts is that when I opened the can there was a hissing as some gas escaped. Somewhere in the back of my memory of science lessons tells me this is a bad thing, but the wort smelled totally normal so I went ahead and made it anyway (I had come too far to give up at this point). If anyone has any reason to believe that this will kill me or anything, please let me know and I'll dump it.

Cheers all!

[GARYSMIFF]

FYI, I was at a boot sale last year and a bloke had 2 Boots London Bitter kits, I swapped out the yeast and brewed up as normal and the result was realy quite good, the tins had a sell by date of 10 years ago I expect the colour was a bit darker than expected other than that its all gone and i'm able to type this.

what have you got to loose 1kg of sugar and a few hours of your time.

[phildodd]

As an update, just took a hyrdo reading of this brew and it was at 1020, a bit high I thought. Gave the sample a taste to check it was okay and it was like taking a swig of Sarsons. Just dumped it all. Not sure whether it was an infection in the wort or one that got in later, I didn't do any of my sanitising differently and have never had a problem before...

Oh well, I'm only down 1kg of malt and a sachet of Safale...