Converting A Kit Into All Grain?

[Will88]

I've been brewing a ginger beer for a few years now that I'm fairly happy with. It's involved using a Morgan's ginger beer kit as a base, then boiling up some raw ginger and other ingredients to add to the fermenter.

I'm considering entering this beer into a competition but it has to be an all grain recipe. The back of the ginger kit was not especially helpful as to what was inside the tin so I thought I might try and hunt down some wisdom here.

Does anyone know anything about converting a kit into the relevant all grain ingredients?

Obviously there will be some malt and some ginger/ginger flavouring, but the quantities and specifics aren't too obvious at the moment. Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Will.

 

[booargy]

Have a read http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...showtopic=30492

 

[bum]

Have a read http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...showtopic=30492

I knew someone was going to post that.

Will, the scratch recipes/variations in that thread all seem decent-to-great but none will produce a GB anything at all like a K&B GB. Very different beasts.

Have a word with the comp organisers to see if the AG thing applies to a GB entry as there traditionally isn't any grain at all in a GB let alone it all being grain. Having said that, the tins do contain an amount of malt, most likely extract.

 

[Will88]

Yeh, my next step is to talk to the organisers.

The kit says there is malt extract in there and I do use a specific blend of LME/powdered ginger/dark brown sugar from my LHBS that I can separate into the relevant quantities easily enough. I just wanted to try and determine how much grain would be equivalent to the amount of malt extract in a tin.

 

[bum]

I guess you could just take a stab at what percentage of your gravity will be provided by all extracts and work backwards from there but it really will be a "suck it and see" type of deal.

 

[Will88]

Fair enough, I'll knock down a test batch some time next week and see how it goes.

Thanks for the tips.

 

[bum]

Post up your results if you nail it - I'm sure it will be of interest to many brewers.

For what it is worth, I think most of the difference between the kit GBs and scratch is all of the chemically-stuff that goes in the tins and will be extraordinarily difficult to reproduce in a scratch recipe. If I were happy with how a kit recipe turned out (and I am, for the most part) I'd keep making that.

 

[manticle]

What kind of a comp allows ginger beer but is exclusively all grain?

 

[Will88]

What kind of a comp allows ginger beer but is exclusively all grain?

It's the BABBs Mash Paddle comp. This year the theme is fruit and it has to be all grain because the winners will get brewed up to large scale and go on tap at Archive.

 

[manticle]

Is ginger fruit?

 

[bum]

Is ginger fruit?

He's discussed this issue in the thread about the comp. Going to add some fruit to it.

For what it is worth, I reckon it'll be hard to make a fruit a main characteristic of a GB and still have it be a GB but it does sound interesting. Something tropical, perhaps? Keep us posted, Will.

 

[manticle]

Ok. Haven't seen that thread.