Ideas for 1st extract

[GOBLIN]

Hi all, So far ive done 6 kit and Kilo brews with The kit and malt and some spec. grains and hops. But i want to get into extract brews and need some ideas for a great tasting full flavor beer. I like my darkish ales and amber ales, have brewed Neils Golden ale kit recipe and that's turned out great but i think im after something with a balanced malt and hop profile to start with.
Any suggestions?

 

[rockstrongo]

Hi Goblin,

I've just started doing some all extract brewing myself and I'll be doing this one when my fermenters are free

http://www.coopers.com.au/the-brewers-guild/how-to-brew/ale/cascarillo-amber-ale

Cheers,

Dave

 

[DU99]

DSGA..ianh's spreadsheet has the recipe...works well with either mosiac and citra hops..

 

[Pat Casey]

Give extract brewing a miss, for the effort involved you will be selling yourself short. What advance is extract brewing over a can kit? It's the same stuff. One of the problems with 100% malt extract beers is that they tend to be overly sweet, especially if you start adding any crystal/caramel malts.

Much better to mash 2 to 2.5 kg of grain with a mini brew in a bag technique and then add that back to a can kit or tin of liquid malt extract and mix it all up in the fermenter. With that amount of grain in the beer you can control the degree of sweetness or dryness in the beer - something you can't do with malt extract. If you want a drier beer then mash at an exageratedly low temp to compensate for the sweetness of the malt extract or can kit.

If you are not sure how much grain you can handle, divide the litre volume of your pot by 6 to get the number of kgs of grain you can use.

For an amber ale you could use this grain bill:

Melanoidin malt 50 grams
Dark crystal malt 150 grams
Amber malt 300 grams
Ale malt 2000 grams

And add it back to a can of Morgans Royal Oak Amber ale, for a bitter beer, or a can of Coopers amber liquid malt extract, or a Nut Brown Ale. Mash temperature would be determined by how sweet or dry a beer you want, and by the attenuation character of the yeast you want to use.

For 2 to 2.5 kg of grain you would boil the resulting wort for 60 minutes and add flavour hops at 30 minutes and some aroma hops very late.

Here's more details and some recipes:
https://absolutehomebrew.com.au/partial_mash_technique_and_recipes

For the effort involved with malt extract beers (boiling,cooling, preparing specialty grain) this type of technique will get you a vastly superior beer. So much so, I think malt extract brewing is a waste of time.

Pat

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Pat makes a VERY good point.

 

[Bribie G]

I have sampled some very reasonable beers made on extract from Aydos in Brisbane and others. However they are almost invariably well-hopped APA style beers where the often aggressive hops balance the sweetness of the malt extract.

Another problem is actually getting hold of some fresh malt extract that hasn't been languishing on shelves for a year. I'd agree with Pat Casey that a good system is to do a mini mash if you are going to use extract, otherwise pimp a kit.

Extract brewing is very popular in the USA as they never had a tradition of kit brewing as we and the UK developed. The upside to that is that they have good access to ample supplies of malt extracts from the likes of Briess. However this didn't really happen in Australia where home brew developed along a different path. Having said that, Briess products are now available from suppliers such as the sponsors above. If you want to dabble in extract brewing I'd suggest you use those brands. Australian malt extracts are mainly intended for baking and confectionery.

Beer kits are made by the likes of Coopers and Morgans in their own mash tuns and are indeed tailored to brewing beer, so as posted above extract brewing is not necessarily a "step up" from kits.

edit: of course Coopers and Morgans (as opposed to Wander malt and the other malt extract makers) make their own home brew malt extracts in tins to give you more flexibility in designing recipes, but they are fierceley expensive and a few 40 dollar brews might convince you to make the step up to AG.