Want to homebrew your own beer, but not ready to invest an arm and a leg in an expensive personal brewery? We think these affordable and compact Hopbox Home Brewing Kits can give you a fun and satisfying start.
A classic brewing kit, there’s nothing high-tech about this — no machines to plug in, no buttons to push, and no bulky equipment to take half the floor space in the basement. Instead, it’s like a basic chemistry set with rustic lab equipment fit for an alchemist whose life’s work has been devoted to discovering how to turn rocks into gold. Or something like that.
Hopbox offers four kinds of kits: Microbrewer, Long One, Double Barrel, and Tall Boy. Each kit comes with a wood base that has designated slots for all included bottles and glass fermenters (which is 1 to 3 gallons, depending on which kit you order), along with all the needed tools, such as a triple-scale hydrometer, an auto-siphon, a stainless steel funnel, a rubber stopper, a double bubble plastic airlock, a lab thermometer, a spare glass jar, a 4-foot tube, and a recipe book. The wood base is made from either pine or cedar, complete with a pull-out drawer that you can use for storing various tools and ingredients.
The creators claim using the system to brew beer is about as simple as “making tea.” Hey, it’s not as easy as making coffee, but that still sounds pretty easy to me. It will take an estimated two weeks to brew a batch, with ready-to-brew recipe kits also available from the outfit.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for HopBox, although it sounds more like a pre-order thing than raising funds for a production run like most crowdfunding projects (if you check online, you’ll see they’ve already been selling these kits in the past — they’re just looking to scale their volume now). Pledges to reserve a kit starts at $170.