The best part about brewing with Mr. Beer is using our Refills. Now you might be wondering what exactly is a Mr. Beer Refill? Watch our Video Blog where we break it all down for you. 

Video Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of what is now called Brew Talk with Mr. Beer. My name is Robert Lewis. I will be your host for today's show. We were filming live on Facebook from office in Tucson, Arizona, so we appreciate all those that are tuning in live now or that will tune in later and watch. If you're not able to watch us live every week, you can find these episodes or past episodes on our Mr. Beer Blog or our YouTube Channel, and they're also on our Facebook Page, and we might be pushing them to other places in the near future. Just to kind of hint what we're trying to do with this y

While we're on the topic of social media, Jude, please follow us on Facebook, Instagram, subscribe to our YouTube Channel. We would greatly appreciate that, and it would help keep you up to date on all things Mr Beer. Also, if you want to learn more about Mr. Beer or just brewing in general, you should join our Mr. Beard, a Facebook group called the Mr. Beer Brewing Society. This can be found on our Facebook page. There is a groups button at the bottom where you can join or if you just search in your search bar, Mr. Beer Brewing Society and apply to join as it is a closed group. We just need you to answer a few questions and once you answer those questions we will let you in and you can start learning all kinds of stuff.

If you are a first-time watcher of Brew Talk with Mr. Beer welcome and we appreciate you joining us today. Our show works like this. I will talk about a topic related to Mr. Beer or brewing with Mr. Beer then we will open it for a Q&A session on our Facebook Live Broadcast. For those of you who are watching live on Facebook, please post your questions and I will try and get to them all. For those who are watching later, I will try and read the live questions out loud, if I remember too, as I am sure if they are asking a question you might have a similar question. Before we dive in today's topic Let me talk about what I'm drinking today. So today I have a beer that was brewed by Ashley. It’s our Canadian Blonde Standard Refill, with a little bit of a hop edition. This is one of the new experiments we're trying to in the office. it’s pretty tasty. Definitely a good one.

All right. So, let's get into today's topic here. Our topic for today is What is a Mr. Beer Refill? It might be a little basic for some of our more advanced brewers or people that have been brewing with Mr. Beer for a while. We do get a lot of new brewers that join our site every day or getting Mr. Beer Kit’s for gifts. So, I thought it was an important topic to discuss. Also, we're the only home brewing company that has what I would call a Refill. Our Refills are a can of Hopped Malt Extract and that is how you brew with Mr. Beer. These are the base ingredients for all our products and the very first thing you will brew when you get a Mr. Beer Kit.  

Along with the Beer Kits, all of these refills are the base for all of our Recipes that we make as well. Our Refills are the core of brewing with Mr. Beer. All of our refills are designed and crafted by Coopers Brewery in Australia, which is unique. Mr. Beer, for those who don't know is owned by Coopers Brewery, which is the largest family owned brewery in Australia, which is really cool. They create all of our ingredients there. Our Refills are produced the same way as the beers they brew it’s just a little different process in the end to get your hop malt extract.

There are 16 different styles of Refills that we offer. We selected the most popular beer styles in the market, so you have a wide variety of things to brew.  

We’re going to go through those 16 styles, just you know what they are. We have our Classic American Light, which will be like commercial light beer, like a Bud Light. We have our American Lager, which is going to be close to a Sam Adams Boston Lager.. We have our American Ale, an American Porter which is similar to the Deschutes Black Butte Porter, which is very good. A Canadian Blonde which is what I'm drinking here. We have our Aztec Cerveza which is like a Mexican style lager which is great for the summer months. Our Grand Bohemian Czech Pilsner which is just a great traditional pilsner. This is a style that is really becoming popular again in the craft beer industry.  So you haven't brewed this one? I'd definitely check it out.

We have our Bavarian Weissbier, which is a wheat beer so if you'd like, Shock Top or Blue Moon, you'll like this one. Our Oktoberfest Lager which is well an, Oktoberfest Lager. It's a great tasting beer and probably one of our most popular styles. Our Saint Patrick's Irish Stout is going to be along the lines of  a Guinness. Our Diablo IPA is going to be a very red and hoppy IPA. Our Long Play IPA is going to be a little less bitter and lighter in color. We have our Northwest Pale Ale, which is similar to the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. One of my all-time favorite beers. Then we have our Churchill’s Nut Brown Ale which is just a great brown ale. Last year we brought back our Winter Dark Ale which is just a very roasty, malty beer.

As you can see we offer a lot of different styles that cover all the basics that you could be looking to brew when you want to try a new style.

Our regular cans are 850 grams. They are a hundred percent malted barley except for the Wheat Beer which has obviously some wheat in it. Our Craft Cans, which would be the Diablo, Bewitched, the Northwest, Long Play, Nut Brown and the Winter Dark are a little bigger. What you'll get here if you brew this is a little higher abv from just the refill, but these tend to be a little more hoppier as well. So if you're going for something that you want to be a little more on the lighter side and less hoppy you will want the Standard Refills.

Depending on where you're ordering from, you might get our Booster. These will come with all the Standard Refills you are ordering from the Mr. Beer website. If you're ordering Refills from other places such as Amazon, you'll get just the can. We also have the Deluxe Refills which come with a pack of LME. Adding the Booster doesn't really change anything for the finished flavor that you're getting in the beer. It's just a bonus item that you get when buying from the Mr. Beer website, which is kind of cool, but either way you’re going to get a great tasting beer.

In each can or Refill is Hopped Malt Extract, which is a whole topic within itself. I think we're going to do a later episode about that. Explain exactly what Hopped Malt Extract is and how it's made. I think that would just be cool for a lot of our new and advanced brewers. Just to understand all the science and the process that goes behind that. We're working on that one. So Hopped Malt Extract basically looks like a maple syrup. I have one here. It's not going to look that great on camera, but you can see the consistency, it's just very thick syrup. That's where all your hops, all your flavor comes from. Everything that you would need to brew comes out of that can.

I thought it'd be cool to dive into a little history of the Mr. Beer Refill. We've always used a Mr. Beer Refill in our kit, but they've always gone by different names.

I did some research this morning, so going back to 1999 to 2000 we had 10 different styles at that point of what we called Mr. Beer Mixes, and these were smaller cans about 550 grams. I managed to find this floating around the office here. That's our old style can our West Coast Pale Ale Beer Mix, which is a kind of cool. Basically, those were just the smaller cans so it was less malt and used more adjuncts. They would use a lot more booster and some other stuff that you would not need to use nowadays.

Then we go into 2013 we introduced the, All Malt Combo. Those were two of the smaller cans put together. We called those our Brewmasters Series. So that'd be taken like a two cans of the West Coast Pale Ale or back then we had the Linebacker Doppelbock or our Red Ale. Some of the names have stayed similar over the years where we were able to and others changed.

Then we stayed with that for a while, Mr. Beer Mixes as the base ingredient.

Then we really change things around in 2013 but before I jump ahead. In 2007 the term “Refills” came about. We moved away from using the term Beer Mixes, to Mr. Beer Refill and this was with the launch of a new website, labels and a lot of new things. That is how the term Mr. Beer Refill came to be and that's still the verbiage that we use today. We’ve been using that ever since. Then in 2013. Mr. Beer was produced by Coopers Brewery, like I said earlier.

They made the refills that we use and that everybody knows and loves today. The change had a huge improvement on flavor for us, which was great. Coopers is the biggest supplier malt extract in the World, so they know what they're doing when it comes to creating these Hopped Malt Extract varieties. We also really use their knowledge and their expertise to create a better flavor and a better beer for the consumer. Which is something that is unique about us. We did the bigger cans and more malt extract, which are a little higher abv, lot more flavor, all that good stuff.

That about sums up my topic on Mr. Beer Refills today. Let me see if we have any Q&A’s here on Facebook live. It looks like, um, nothing at the moment.

So if you have any questions when you watch this later, just comment on our video, we'll go ahead and answer those for you. We will be filming every week on Wednesday at noon. So, it's noon Pacific, three o'clock on the east coast. Don't forget to join our Facebook group. We are taking requests for future episodes and we appreciate you taking the time to watch the video today, Cheers.