Modern Homebrew Recipes (56 page)

If you’re confused by what that means, here’s a quick example. First, let’s handle the dilution factor. If you have 3 gallons of 1.060 wort, and you top it off to 5 gallons by adding water, the final gravity of that batch will be 1.036. To reach that number, take the gravity points of the concentrated boil (60) and multiply by the volume (3) to yield the number of gravity points in the wort (180). Adding 2 gallons of 1.000 water doesn’t change the total gravity points, just the volume. So the final gravity is the number of points of sugar (180) divided by the batch size (5), which gives 36, or 1.036 specific gravity. You could also do this by percentage scaling, if that makes more sense to you. The concentrated boil (3) is 60% of the total volume (5), so you can multiply by 0.6 to get the same answer.

How do you calculate hop bitterness? If you’re only boiling hops in the concentrated boil, you need to determine the bitterness based on a 1.060 gravity beer, not a 1.036 beer. Perform the standard bitterness calculations (see
Appendix A
, or use recipe software) using the higher gravity and actual boil volume, which will estimate the bitterness of the concentrated boil. You can scale IBUs the same way as the specific gravity because IBUs are a measure of isomerized alpha acids in solution (diluting the bitterness with additional water reduces the IBUs accordingly). Apply the same scaling factor based on batch size to get the estimated IBUs of the final beer.

The basic point to remember is that if you use a concentrated boil, you will have to add more bittering hops to reach the same level of perceived bitterness as the full boil recipe. There are other limiting factors;
remember that it’s nearly impossible to get more than 100 IBUs in a beer, so if your concentrated boil is above that limit, you should cap it. You won’t get an 80 IBU beer by diluting a 160 IBU beer with an equal portion of water since a 160 IBU beer can’t exist.

Different volumes
– For homebrew-size recipes, you can typically apply a batch scaling factor to the weight of the malt and hops to get an equivalent recipe. If you want to brew a double-sized batch, double all the ingredients. If you want to brew a half-sized batch, halve all the ingredients. If you’re converting a 6.5 gallon recipe to 5 gallons, use 77% as the scaling factor (5.0 / 6.5 = .769). This isn’t perfect math, but it’s close enough for the batch sizes homebrewers use. Recipe software works wonders for this type of scaling.

Matching malt to extract
– You can replace specific malts with ‘varietal’ flavors (if available), but that can be expensive. Some styles (such as
bocks
) depend more heavily on the flavors of Munich or Vienna malt, for instance. Some brewers writing 5-gallon recipes will add in a pound of Munich (maybe 10% of the grist) here or there just to increase the overall maltiness (guilty as charged). If the flavor of a specific malt is an important part of the style profile, try to use an extract version of that malt. If an ingredient is used only as an accent, it’s not vital to the recipe and can be substituted.

Munich, wheat, and rye malt extracts exist, and can be used as substitutes. It’s also possible to find Maris Otter extract, which is pretty important for many English beer styles. You may need to search some of the larger online homebrew retailers for these products if you don’t see them in your local shop. Given their specific uses, they can sometimes be hard to find.

I tend to use pale or extra pale LME and DME as much as possible. If using amber or darker extracts, you often have no idea what malt produced the color; therefore, the flavor of the extract is a big unknown (for example, was dark extract made using chocolate malt, roasted barley, black malt, dark crystal malts, caramel coloring, or something else? They all have different flavor profiles). You also have no idea what mash program was used, so you won’t know the wort composition or fermentability. In general, I assume that pale malt extract is made with pale ale malt, and extra pale malt extract is made with two-row or Pilsner malt. If the malt extract comes from a certain country, I might further assume that the flavor will have a character typical of base malt that originates from there.

If you can obtain information about the composition of the malt extract, you can do a better job matching the extract to the base malt. Modern extract often comes with more information, and some is produced from single varieties of malt. Read the information packaged with extract carefully, as you might not be getting what you expect. For instance, some wheat extracts are actually a blend of a pale malt and wheat malt in a ratio common for brewing German weisse beers. You don’t want to assume that it is 100% wheat malt, because it may be 50–65%, and throw off your recipe. Instead of just using the blend, you’d want to substitute the wheat malt extract for both the pale and wheat malts from the original recipe in the same proportion.

The earlier section on
Ingredient Substitution
has other ideas that you might want to use to add flavors that might be present in the all-grain base malt but not in the extract. If there are character malts in the grist that are providing flavor and not gravity points, you can steep them or perform a mini-mash. Note that steeping starchy grains will add unconverted starch to your wort, which could lead to clarity problems.

Some of the starch will likely go away as part of the break. Anything darker than light Munich malt that isn’t a crystal or roasted malt falls into this category. I would generally treat these as minor grist additions, unless it has a signature flavor (dark Munich, brown malt, etc.). I’d generally use a mini-mash for these, or in a pinch, steep them since I care more about their flavor contributions than potential problems with clarity.

Eliminating small grist additions
– Sometimes all-grain brewers have personal preferences for including a little bit of certain malts as a ‘house character’ ingredient, or add in certain grains only for their side effects (adding body, assisting with head retention, adjusting color). These grains can often be eliminated since the issues they are trying to address are generally not present in extract beers. For instance, if you see a brewer including less than 5% wheat malt in a recipe, chances are they included it to improve head retention. Small additions of CaraPils, flaked oats, flaked barley, dextrin malt, and the like are typically used to increase body. Less than 1% of a dark grain or malt is likely just to add a darker hue to the appearance, or to add a touch of dryness. As I mentioned previously, up to 10% of Munich or Vienna malt is likely being used to increase the general maltiness of the beer, and can be converted to pale malt extract (unless you want to perform a mini-mash).

Converting First Wort Hop additions
– First wort hopping (FWH) is difficult to perform on extract batches since you never lauter the beer. You could mix together the full volume of extract and water, raise it to mash temperature, then slowly syphon it into another pot, and bring it to a boil when done. But it’s probably easier to convert it to traditional additions. You could try using the FWH addition as a 20 minute boil addition instead, as equal levels of perceived bitterness and some hop flavor should persist. Or you can calculate the IBU contributions of the FWH addition, and add those IBUs through a flavor addition and a bitterness addition. Use the same quantity of FWH hops as a flavor addition at 10 minutes, calculate the bitterness of that 10 minute addition, and calculate how many hops need to be added at 60 minutes to reach the same level of IBUs. Or you can ignore the flavor contributions of the FWH hops and use them as a straight bittering addition at 60 minutes. That’s admittedly a little sloppy, but certainly easy.

Accounting for the mash schedule and fermentability
– Several mash techniques bring flavor and body contributions to the beer. For example, a step mash increases fermentability and attenuation, a decoction mash increases the maltiness and color of the beer, as well as improves efficiency and attenuation, and higher-temperature rests build body. An all-grain brewer controls wort fermentability through selecting rest temperatures in the mash program; if the rest temperatures are too high, or the wort contains excessive dextrins, then the wort fermentability is likely to be too low.

If your beer lacks sufficient fermentable sugars (i.e., you wind up with a high final gravity), next time substitute sugars for some of the malts. Corn sugar and plain table sugar are both highly fermentable and add little, if any, flavor. If the body of your beer is too thin (due to an excessively fermentable wort), reduce the amount of plain sugars. If there are no sugars in the recipe, add some malt with dextrins such as CaraPils. Start with 2 or 3% of the total fermentables.

If your recipe uses a decoction mash, try adding Munich malt (which is also available as an extract). Dark Munich and aromatic malts can all provide the extra color and flavor commonly produced during decoction mashes. You can add these (depending on the style, but try to limit them to 5 to 10% of the total fermentables to start), but you may cause other problems (such as needing to perform a mini-mash).

Economical purchasing quantities
– While it’s easy to crunch the numbers to find the necessary amounts of extract you need to exchange for malts, you can’t always buy exactly the right amounts due to how they are packaged. So you wind up buying more than you need, and not using it all during that brew session. Using full cans or jugs of LME can reduce the possibility that the remaining amount will oxidize and ruin future batches. DME is more stable, as long as you keep it dry. Measuring DME over a pot of boiling water is a bad idea since steam can enter the bag and cause the powder to solidify.

It may be advantageous to first determine the weight of the LME you can buy in an individual container, then use whole multiples of that weight in your recipe. Determine the number of gravity points each container contributes (weight of container • 36), and then divide that into the total number of gravity points needed. Take the whole number of containers (mathematically this is the quotient) and allocate that towards LME. Calculate the remaining gravity points; this value is what the DME needs to contribute. Divide those gravity points by 45 to determine the number of pounds needed (it’s easier to weigh out fractional amounts of DME than LME).

CONVERTING ALL-GRAIN RECIPES TO MINI-MASH

Mini-mash is a good option when your grist includes some character grains for which there are no extract equivalents. You can also use it with base malt when the character of that malt is an important part of the recipe. Any time you have the opportunity to use grain instead of extract, you are likely to get more of the flavor you want into the beer.

A mini-mash is kind of like a small scale brew-in-a-bag. You put the gains to be mashed in a mesh bag, and then put it inside a vessel where you hold the water. Unlike steeping, you don’t use the full volume of water for the recipe. Use enough so the mash is on the thin side, but easily stirred with a wooden spoon (roughly 2 to 3 quarts per pound). You leave the mash alone for about an hour, remove the bag, and strain out the liquid. You can also sparge with hot water during this step, if that is part of your process.

Selecting which grains to mash involves more than just identifying what doesn’t have an extract equivalent. Since you are actually mashing, you need to make sure there are sufficient enzymes to convert all the
starches in the mash. Most base malts contain enough enzymes to fully convert themselves (plus some extra). In general, the paler the malt, the more enzymes. Six-row malt contains significantly more enzymes than two-row, but has a coarser flavor. Munich malt (light) has just enough enzymes to self-convert, but you’ll need supplemental enzymes for anything darker.

Mini-mashes allow you to use starchy adjuncts like flaked oats, corn, and rye. They don’t have enzymes at all, and as a result, must be mashed with other grains. Without getting into calculating amounts of enzymes, it’s safe to have at least an equivalent weight of two-row, Pilsner, or pale ale malt with whatever other ingredients you’re using. I wouldn’t expect Vienna and Munich to fully convert (even though they will with the right conditions), so to be certain, add some Pilsner malt too. If you aren’t sure if a malt has enzymes or not, assume it doesn’t just to be safe.

I find mini-mashes to be more work than full mashes since they are harder to control temperature wise (unless you have more specialized equipment). I wouldn’t worry about precise temperature control for the mash in a mini-mash; aim for around 150°F (66°C) but don’t stress about it as long as you are over 140°F (60°C). Mash the grains for an hour, stirring every 15 minutes. You should try to maintain a constant temperature in the mash, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. Putting the mash in a warm (but not turned on) oven may help you maintain the temperature better than leaving it out in the open.

The process for converting an all-grain recipe to mini-mash is similar to converting to extract. First, separate out the steeping grains; don’t include those in the calculation. Then identify the specialty or character grains that don’t have an extract equivalent; those go directly into the mini-mash. Assess those grains to see if there are enzymes present (typically, there won’t be), take an equal weight of base malt to match the weight of the character grains, and add them to the mini-mash. If the base malt is only Vienna or Munich, add an equal portion of Pilsner malt. To finish your mini-mash, add the steeping grains that were separated out.

For whatever base malt remains, perform the calculation from the extract-only section to come up with the equivalent amount of extract to use. The calculation is exactly the same once you have moved all the other grain to the mini-mash. Calculate the amount of extract to replace the remaining grain, and add that to the kettle once the mini-mash has
ended (and the grain has been removed). Top off with the rest of the volume of water, bring to a boil, and proceed to brew as directed in the original recipe.