First Extract

[butters73]

G'day, gonna try an extract. I've got a few recipes picked out but most state LME but having to mailorder ingrediants I've only got plenty of DME, what is the amount of dry malt to match 1kg of liquid malt? From what I've read of many posts should I add about 500g DME to about 6 or so litres of water bring to the boil and use this as the base for all hop additions. If so should I boil the rest of the malt in water in another pot and add to the fermenter with the other pot or could I just boil all the malt in about 10 - 15 litres of water and add the hop additions? I apologize if this question has been asked a million times but I'm after a rough ratio of DME to water. I'm sure I'll have plenty more questions shortly. Cheers Kingo.

 

[Hatchy]

You want the SG of yr boil to be about 1040 for the best hop utilision. Having said that I've boiled hops in water & it made beer. I use (about) 500g liquid in 5L water for my hop boil. You want slightly less with dry extract. Ianh's spreadsheet should tell you what you want I reckon.

 

[stm]

Kingo - yes, you've got it about right. 500g or so of DME in 6L or so of water is fine. To answer your specific question, LME is about 20% water, so the equivalent of 1kg of LME is approx 0.8kg of DME. The remainder of the DME can be added to the boil with a few minutes to go, just to sanitise it. If you are comfortable that it is reasonably sanitary, then you can just chuck it in the fermenter, just like we used to do in our kit days.

Note that the lower the SG of your boil the better the hop utilisation. 1040 is sometimes given as a typical SG for the boil but 1020 (say) will actually give you better utilisation. But you don't want to go too low because the bitterness extracted is apparently harsher.

 

[Hatchy]

That's a better explanation than mine. I'd also recommend putting all the extract in the boil at the end. It all clumps up in balls if you chuck it straight in the fermenter.