Review, beers made with brewing kits can sometimes have lower ABV levels than expected. That's because this is handcrafted beer and not rocket fuel. Alcohol dries up beer and can significantly impact the flavor of beer.

However, should you want to give ABV a little kick upwards and get tipsy a bit faster, then this is how you would do it...

The question that triggered this article was for a stout kit which was supposed to brew a 4.7% ABV beer. Now, frankly, that is still a pretty good level, although after visiting some micro-breweries some brewers want to brew beers upwards of the 8 to 9%+ ABV!!

The reason why this beer is low in alcohol is because it is brewed using many different specialty grains which contain mostly non-fermentable sugars. Only fermentable sugars are turned into alcohol during fermentation. That's all that fermentation is... it is yeast eating up sugar and converting it into ethanol.

So, when you look at brewing beer, what you are basically doing is adding sugars to water and then adding yeast to eat those sugars away and convert some into alcohol. When you have residual sugars or non-fermentable sugars or both, you basically brew a malty beer. However, if you don't have as many residual sugars and yeast convert most of those sugars into alcohol, you begin to get a drier beer.

So you could add some fermentable sugars to the your recipe and increase the alcohol content that way, but you also have to take into account that it can dry up your beer. This may be good or bad depending on what you are brewing. Brewing different styles of beer require different techniques. Sometimes what you don't want to get in one beer is desired in another...

See, other things begin to change when you toy around with the ABV level of your beer, like the time it takes to carbonate, the mouthfeel of the beer, yeast pitching rate, etc.

In fact, one of the most common mistakes brewers make is not pitching enough yeast for their beer. Higher alcohol beers require more yeast and sometimes requires other techniques to avoid yeast from stressing out in high alcohol content worts. If you don't account for this, you may end up with a beer with a high FG. You probably will still get a great beer, but it could be better if you understand how alcohol fully affects your brew.

If you really want to kick up the tipsyness of your beer, you might as well brew an imperial stout. This means you basically add all kinds of ingredients so that the beer doesn't turn out to be watery or loses its maltyness. Then again, this requires more ingredients, more sugar, more yeast and more time to ferment, condition and carbonate.

Jorge Zarate is the author of Brew Beer And Drink It, a home brewing blog about Brewing different beer styles, and Beer Bloggers Network, a site dedicated to craft beer...