Overview
Beer making is complex! There are essentially 3 ways to do it:
- kit brewing,
- extract brewing, and
- all grain brewing.

Extract brewing and grain brewing account for a small percentage of sales, but they both require a significant investment in equipment and perishable ingredients if they are to be properly supported. If only half supported, all you will do is create a market for specialist on-line stores.

Even if you own a store in an area with a large captive audience, you will still find it hard to justify the cost of shelf space for these products. And to provide the freshest ingredients, you will need to turnover lots of grains, hops, specialist yeasts etc, all with short shelf lives.

So, best left to the specialist on-line stores who dont have the overheads that shops do, and can target the entire island in order to keep sales volumes high enough to keep their ingredients fresh.

This leaves kit brewing. Kit brewing requires:
- a beer kit,
- equipment, and
- ingredients.

Kit Brewing Beer Kits
Beer kits come in a can containing hopped malt extract, yeast, and instructions. Even this can be daunting as there are hundreds of beer kits! Which is why we strongly suggest Coopers beer kits only:
- they outsell all other beer kits in Ireland combined,
- they have a wide enough range of top quality products to cater for most tastes,
- they are practically bullet proof (very easy to support, never any problems),
- they are designed for retail and look great on shelves,
- they provide an integrated retail solution with branded ingredients to go with the beer kits.
Another compelling reason to stock Coopers is that we can get their products to you at the same pricing that UK stores pay for them. In other words, you can be very competitive, or operate at higher margins, or both.

Kit Brewing Equipment
More complexity, this just doesn't get easy! However, it can be summarised as follows:
- primary fermentation (requires fermenter, airlock, thermometer, hydrometer/trial jar), and
- secondary fermentation (requires either a pressurised keg, or else bottles and a means of filling them).

To keep things simple, we suggest that you stock the Coopers Microbrewery Starter Kit. Its not the cheapest kit out there but it has several advantages for retailers: 
- it looks great on display,
- it contains everything, even an instructional DVD,
- it produces great quality beer every time (so little or no support required),
- its the best selling equipment solution in the world by far, and
- its the best equipment kit out there.

A disadvantage for retailers is that its a low margin product. Coopers explain this as follows:
- they have the best beers and ingredients in the world, and at the best pricing with great margins for retailers,
- but thats not much good unless they provide consumers with the proper equipment to make the beer,
- so the idea is that we all take a hit on the equipment in order to develop the re-order business.

Worldwide, re-orders for beers from customers with a Coopers Microbrewery Starter Kit are as follows:
- 7 beer kits per year (plus ingredients etc).
Thats a lot more than the RRP of the starter equipment. Coopers tell us to look at this as an investment in sustainable sales. Re-orders from many other kits are as low as one or two before the consumer gives up homebrewing.

You can build your own equipment solutions, but unless you copy the Coopers solution, you run the risk of putting a lot of energy into a business that doesn't generate repeat business. If you do decide to copy the Coopers solution (we already have, but then we sell lots of kits), we will need to put up another article here showing you how to do it.

Coopers equipment kits require consumers to purchase Coopers Carbonation Drops every time they make a beer. We have found that consumers are delighted to do this in order to achieve a quality beer, even though it adds almost 3 Euros to the cost.

An essential item for all homebrewers is a cleaner/sterilizer. Again, there are dozens of options. But the most popular by far is VWP.

Kit Brewing Ingredients
This is not so complex, ingredients are:
- cans of liquid malt extract,
- spray dried malt extract (spraymalt),
- dextrose and brewing sugar,
- carbonation drops,
- brew enhancers.

Coopers provide all of these. However, the cost of shipping some of them from Australia means that they can be relatively expensive. For example, Dextrose is dextrose monohydrate (aka glucose) and it really doesn't matter what part of the world it comes from. Fortunately, we are agents for both Coopers and HB, and HB also supply dextrose at a fraction of the cost of  Coopers dextrose. Same goes for spraymalts.

The thing is that when you pick up a Coopers beer kit, the instructions will tell you to use it with certain additional ingredients. So its important to stock these ingredients and to be able to get them at the right price.

Summary
Our Retail Packs For 0.5 and 1.0 Meter Displays contain optimum beer solutions depending on your available floor space and budget.

NB Buying patterns change from location to location. It is critical that you maintain sufficient stocks of the ingredients that go along with the beer kits. For example, if you pick up a Canadian Blonde there is a big sticker on the lid telling you to use it in conjunction with Brew Enhancer 1. So if you are out of BE1, you will probably lose the sale.

The retail packs come with a balanced mix of beer kits and ingredients, but you must make sure that you dont run out of the ingredients that are required to make the beer kits.

Full product details and images can be found on our retalier site: http://homebrewwest.ie