Some thoughts in between brewing...

A few pieces of information I've gathered over the last couple of days:

1.  I've purchased John Palmers 'How to Brew' from Fishpond for $22 which should arrive in time for the next brew.  While I can just read it on the website I figure it'll be easier to digest in paper form.

2.  The Brewshop.co.nz website has some interesting comments about starting up your home brewing and how to improve the brew which I'll summarise here:

a) You can improve the brew by using a specialised yeast as opposed to that supplied in the brew kit - the rationale being you don't know the quality of the yeast supplied.  

b) Rather than pouring the yeast on the top of the brew in the fermenter you can rehydrate the yeast in some warm water (important that the water is between 24-30 degrees which suggests you need a proper thermometer to measure the water temp) and then pour it into the brew.

c) The beer kits often don't have enough malt or hops in them... which begs the question if you aren't satisfied with the yeast, hops or malt in a kit why bother in the first place?


Conclusions:

One option I could continue to use the base kit but add a different yeast and add some hops... if I used this approach with the same IPA kit then I would have a 'base' beer to test different mixes of hops from.

Maybe I should abandon the beer kits altogether and source the malt extract by itself, add hops (and yeast) and brew yourself.... how hard can it be ;)  But seriously, this could be a good intermediate step before I consider moving to making a wort.