



As with any craft, understanding the materials you're working with is the first step towards mastery. For the extract brewer, extract is the largest ingredient after water yet many extract brewers have only a rudimentary understanding of extract. Understanding how extract is made and used is a good first step to brewing better beer. Extract either replaces or supplements the base grains used by an all grain brewer, providing the sugars necessary for fermentation. In addition to sugars, extract will also provide flavor and color to the beer.



Extract is available to the homebrewer in two forms, either as Dried Malt Extract (DME) or as Liquid Malt Extract (LME). In order to make malt extract the maltster starts with malted grain which is mashed, sparged/lautered and then brought to a boil in much the same way that an all grain brewer would make wort. In fact Breiss Malting claims to run one of the largest brewhouses in Wisconsin for the purposes of making extract. Instead of continuing on to produce beer, the wort is then concentrated to produce DME and/or LME. DME is spray dried, where the wort is sprayed in a fine mist causing the water to quickly evaporate and the concentrated wort to fall as a fine powder. LME is vacuum evaporated in order to concentrate the wort into a thick syrup.





love2brew's Dry DME

No matter which form you choose to work with, the modern homebrewer has a many options when choosing extracts. Just a few years ago, extract brewers were limited in the types of beer they could brew since extracts were only available in “light”, and either “amber” or “dark” varieties. Now malt extract made is made with all sorts of base grains including Munich, Wheat and even Sorghum for gluten free brewing. Extracts are also available in hopped and unhopped versions. The hopped versions have already had hops added to them during the production process, although most hombrewers tend towards the unhopped versions as it allows another avenue of creativity.

When using extracts, LME can often be substituted for DME (or the other way around) but you will need to adjust your recipe. Generally, you will need to use about 1.25lb of LME for every pound of DME as DME is more concentrated. You want to add your extract to boiling water that has been removed from heat. This will help the extract dissolve, but avoid a boilover.





Because extracts have already been boiled by the manufacturer, there is no requirement that they be boiled for an hour. You will want to boil for at least 15 minutes to make sure that the extract has fully dissolved and that the wort has been sanitized. Boiling wort causes the wort to darken and develop flavors, so for lighter beers you may want to avoid doing a full boil and add the majority of your extract towards the end. You will need to add some of your extract at the beginning of the boil, as the extract is needed to maintain proper water chemistry to assure proper hop utilization. What this means is that if you need to get a quick brew session in you can do an extract brew with only a 15 minute boil. You will need to re-configure your recipe to maintain proper bittering levels as bittering is dependent on boil time, but this can be accounted for by doubling your bittering hop addition. This is not necessarily an inferior way to brew, as many all grain brewers have been experimenting with “hop bursting” where the traditional 60 minute hop addition is replaced by a larger 20 minute hop addition. (For a 20 minute boil you would increase your bittering hop addition by ½) I have found for some styles of beer that hop bursting can produce a cleaner and smoother bitterness over the more traditional method.



I hope this information proves useful to you. If you ever have any questions, please feel free to contact me at meschaefer @ gmail . com. You can also follow me on twitter @craftedbarley.