Just add water.

Home brewing sounds cool. A home brewing rig would be a Christmas-conquering gift for the brewnnoisseurs in your life. Make your own beer! Hell yeah! Visions of frothy lagers and creamy stouts will flow through their heads. But it’s a lot of work to build a fancy DIY brewing rig. What if you go full-on, invest in all the tubs and kegs and wort they need for a big fancy home brewing rig, and then they discover, uh, it’s really really hard and not really all that much fun?

That’s where Mr. Beer comes in. This kit provides the brew-curious with a gentle introduction to the world of home brewing, complete with everything they need to brew and bottle two gallons of beer in the comfort of their own basement, garage, or kitchen.

Aspiring Adolphus Busches and Sam Adamses get everything they need to dip a toe into homebrew except the water: a fermenting keg, eleven 25oz bottles, carbonation drops, Irish Stout extract, yeast, and instructional DVD. If it’s fun, they can get more refills. If it’s really fun, they can get into more hardcore home brewing.

Most importantly, if it kind of sucks, you’re only out 25 bucks for the gift. That’s what you’d pay for a case of decent beer. And most of those don’t even come with an instructional DVD.