More and more suds sippers ire learning that it's possible to make top-quality beer for less with ...

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Fermentation, as most of you know, is accomplished by single-celled fungi called yeast, and each of our seven kits contained the appropriate types and amounts of the useful little plants. Yeasts are divided into two varieties-lager (bottom fermenting) and ale (top fermenting)-and most of the suppliers who identified their yeasts indicated that they had chosen the lager variety. The relative merits of each are open for discussion: Lagers are slower acting, work better in cool temperatures, and produce subtle light beers. Ale yeast is more hardy and less subject to contamination, works better at warmer temperatures and yields a more pungent beverage.

Some brewers also add mild water conditioners to their fermenting mixtures . . . to provide a proper pH environment for healthy yeast growth and to encourage efficient starch conversion. Duane Imports, Great Fermentations, Specialty Products, and The Brick Store all provide water salts ... and we recommend such helpers to folks whose household water is soft.

TASTING

After we'd brewed up a batch of each beer exactly according to the distributor's

instructions (we used a Leigh P. Beadle recipe for The Brick Store kit) and aged them for 25 days, we cracked open samples for a panel of seven testers.

Though the preferences expressed by our group of tipplers were diverse, the evaluators produced several valuable generalizations. For example, all of our tasters preferred the Wine and Brew Hobby mixture over the other homebrews . . . but only by a scant margin. A most interesting result was that a widely available American commercial brew-added as a control-finished quite high in the flavor category . . . and was, in fact, preferred by many.

Longer aging likely would have helped all of the homebrews reach their full potential. However, it's important for anyone contemplating the purchase of one of the kits to understand that the ingredients and recipes are meant only as starting points. Once you have the basic components necessary for brewing (which are available in any of the packages), you can either continue to produce the relatively economical beers-with sugar-derived alcohol contents-described above, or you can move on to more sophisticated malt recipes. Many homebrews have been acknowledged-by experts-to be good enough to challenge the finest imported beers, and you can produce such a sipping mixture for about the price of a bargain six-pack at the grocery. (If your interest is aroused, we'd suggest that you try the MOTHER-tested recipe in the accompanying sidebar.

ALE'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

To produce a rich, tangy ale--wellsuited to sipping on a soft summer evering-start by heating a gallon of water in a pot of at least two-gallon capacity. While the liquid warms, place two 3.5pound cans of Munton & Fison, Edme, or similar-quality malt extract in a separate container of hot water to liquify. (You can substitute 6 pounds of top-notch English dry maltavailable, from many beermaking supply shops-for the extract if you'd prefer to.)

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