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Originally Posted by BierNewbie After 3 no-boil kits I almost gave up on making good beer. My first partial extract was so much better that I have not looked back. Yes, I think no-boil kits are inferior. I like to have control over the hops and you don't have that with the no-boil kits. I'm not saying you can't have a good beer from a no-boil kit but my experience is that partial extract kits are better.
My next batch will be my first all-grain batch and look forward even more to having the most control over the final product.  |
You do have a point there, since there's not much you can do to modify a no-boil kit. And there are huge differences between the quality of no-boil kits, sometimes even between kits of a same brand (Munton's Old Conkerwood is great, Midas Touch tasted terrible).
Another problem that I've encountered with Munton's kits is that they all taste very much like the same. Munton's makes lots of good kits, but they seem to use same kinds of hops in all of them, and when you combine this with the same yeast in every kit then it's no surprise they taste similar.
Despite all this I think that beer kits are a good way to start brewing, if you want to start cheap and easy. Just as long as you do some reserch and find out what's good and what's not.
Where I live it's almost impossible to find anything else than Cooper's beer kits, so I mainly use them. The results have been good for the most part, so I think it's unfair to say that you can't make good beer from kits.