Home Brew Gift Ideas: A Beery Christmas!

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re not too familiar with home brewing yourself, but you know someone who is. With Christmas on the horizon, this is the perfect chance to impress the brewer in your life with a well-thought-out and useful gift! The only potential problem is, you have no idea what to get them…

Fortunately, we’re here to help you identify what level of brewer you’re buying for, and the perfect beer brewing gifts for them. The following ideas are aimed at helping your home brewer take their hobby up to the next level.

Everybody starts somewhere, typically with a lot of sweating, cursing and mess, but those who stick with it will be rewarded with great beer. The home brew beginner can be identified fairly easily, in that they will have recently started boring everyone they know about the intricacies of beer and brewing.

All jokes aside, if someone you know has just started brewing, it’s likely that they’re using kit beers. Basically unfermented beer extract in a can, they’re a great starting point and ideal for gifts.

A quick search online for ‘Christmas ale kit’ will pull up several online stores, including Amazon, stocking a wide variety of Christmas ales that the beginner can brew with ease. The best home brew gifts are usually fairly simple, and this could not be simpler. For an extra twist, suggest to your brewer that they can experiment with adding spices to this beer, to give it an extra Christmassy feel. Check the size of the kit in terms of how many litres it makes, with 23 litres generally being the most popular.

Great beer brewer gifts encourage your brewer to take their hobby to the next level, and books are a great way to provide inspiration and knowledge. ‘Home Brew Beer’ by Greg Hughes offers invaluable information that’s well presented and easy to digest. For more ideas, check out our guide to the best home brewing books. [Link to article when created]

If the home brew in your life has been dabbling in the hobby for a fair few months now, chances are they’ve moved on from kit beers and onto ‘all grain brewing’. This is a far more time-consuming and complex way of brewing, but it gives the brewer full control over the finished beer. It can be more difficult to know what to get a proficient brewer, but by no means impossible.

One of the most exciting steps in home brewing is moving away from bottles and onto kegs. Many brewers are under the impression that it’s difficult to keg, but your perfect home brew gift will let them know otherwise!

A mini keg package is an excellent gift idea for brewers who are a little wary of getting into kegging. IKegger offers many options, with kegs as small as 2 litres, up to 10 litres, all of which will comfortably fit into a normal fridge. The package comes complete with everything your brewer needs to get into kegging, including gas, regulators, taps and hoses.

The master brewer is the one who has been brewing for a few years now and normally comes to the party with a steady supply of excellent beers. They’re probably already using kegs and seem to have everything a brewer could ever need. But there’s always something...

A kegerator is a fridge dedicated to beer, fitted with taps that allow you to serve draft beer from the comfort of your own home. Creating a kegerator from scratch can be difficult, but with an iKegger kegerator kit, it’s easy! Just bear in mind, your brewer will need a fridge for this project, but a second hand bar fridge is cheap, easy to find online and ideal.

Certain beer styles are served using nitrogen rather than co2. We won’t go into this now, but a master brewer will know all about nitro stouts. Many brewers don’t have the equipment required to create this superbly creamy style (think Guinness), as it’s difficult to get your hands on the right gas, but iKegger makes it simple. With a choice of keg sizes, this is the ideal home brew gift for fans of the black stuff. Additionally, these kits can be used to create nitro cold brew coffee and cocktails.

Beer brewing gifts can be difficult to get right, especially if you’re not quite sure what the brewer in your life already has. Sometimes, the choice of selecting their own fantastic gift is the best Christmas present for a home brewer, regardless of their level.

Here at iKegger, we offer a gift card of various values, from €10 to €300, and provide a wide range of great equipment for those who keg their beers, or are looking to get into doing it the easy way. Other stores are great for brewing equipment and ingredients.

There’s a huge variety of potential home brew gifts out there, but it’s best to know what the home brewer in your life already has, and what they’re interested in. You simply can’t go wrong with a gift card or a case of craft beer, but for something a little special, it’s worth finding out what you can about where they want to take their brewing next!

Beery Christmas one and all!