Time. Probably one of the most valuable things we come across when brewing. For myself, being a business owner and dad, I find myself having to make good use of the time I have to do things like brewing and blogging. I love the brewing process and will always prefer to do all-grain brewing, but when I want to evaluate a specific ingredient or hop, I prefer to use this opportunity to save time and utilize extract.

Extract is not an inferior product to all-grain

Time and time again, award winning beers have been and are produced using extract! Extract tends to get a bad wrap for creating what I call “homebrew flavor”. It’s that unrefined, harsh, sometimes phenolic taste, that comes when beginner homebrewers share their pride a joy to others. It’s not the extract’s fault, per se, but more importantly, it’s the failure to follow good technique for the product to showcase its potential.

Depending on which product you use, liquid and dry extract, are essentially all-grain worts where the water is removed to provide a compact, shelf-stable product. All-grain wort is made similar to how we homebrewer’s make it, and the resulting run-off from the mash is sent through evaporator units to remove up to 80% of the moisture. If the extract is hopped, the hops are added to a kettle to isomerize the alpha-acids after the run-off and then sent to the evaporators. For dry malt extract (DME) the evaporated product is then sent to a centrifuge to remove the remaining water, leaving the powdery substance behind.

For all my extract brewing, I prefer to use DME since the extra moisture removal slows the oxidation reactions, resulting in a fresher product. Liquide Malt Extract (LME) tends to age faster over time, becoming darker, soapy and stale, so unless it’s extremely fresh, I would shy away from it.

Compensate for lack of nutrients and concentrated minerals

So what would happen if you took your all-grain wort and sent it through the evaporator? Removing all that water, you would think, would cause a concentration of everything, including minerals. It also causes a problem with FAN (Free Amino Nitrogen). FAN in LME and DME is lower than all-grain worts, resulting in a nutrient deficient environment for yeasts.

This environment isn’t ideal, to begin with, so we’re going to do some doctoring in order to ensure a healthy fermentation and great flavor development.

Utilize a yeast nutrient, such as Fermax, to make up for the loss in FAN during the extract making process. This will provide insurance so our wort fermentation is fast and complete. (Note: You can also provide FAN by doing a partial mash. This mini-mash will provide FAN as well, but we’ll assume here we’ll do extract with steeping grains) Use distilled water for your water dilution with extract. Since the extract has a decent mineral content already, adding your tap water to the extract could potential bump the minerals into a detectable zone.

Adjust your water pH to 5.2 to 5.6

Part of the preventing flabby, dull beer brewed from extract is making sure the boil pH is in an ideal range. When brewing all-grain this is usually accomplished by adjusting your mash pH. Since we are skipping the mash process by utilizing extract, we’re going to adjust the pH before the wort begins to boil.

I do this by using 88% Phosphoric acid and a pH meter. A temperature compensated pH meter is needed as the temperature of your pre-boiled wort should be around 170, after steeping your grains. Edit: Thanks to Reddit user chino_brews for pointing out that recommending to adjust your pH, at that high of temperature, can cause problems. When I brewed the Single Hop Trial Recipe below, I actually adjusted the water pH before heating and adding any steeping grains or extract. This is the way I adjust my pH when all grain brewing, except I adjust to 5.5 so the mash brings it down to the 5.2 range. It’s a simplified way of doing pH adjustment without having to take into account of mineral additions and mash composition.

Add acid to reduce your ph, slowly, until you hit 5.2 or close to it. This will ensure that your final boil pH is in the proper range. Don’t overshoot and go too low of a pH or the resulting effect will cause a slower fermentation.

Get a big enough boil kettle and burner to do a full boil

Another common issue with brewing extract, especially from kits, is they have you perform a concentrated boil. The main reason being that it’s easier to get a boil on the stove top with a smaller, concentrated volume, and add water later to bring your batch to 5 gallons.

The main issue with a concentrated boil is that you end up caramelizing sugars and darkening your wort more than you would if you added the water in the beginning of your boil. Morebeer does a great job explaining the side effects….

Maillard reactions are also responsible for thick and heavy flavors sometimes found in extract-based beers that are boiled in concentrated form. Many extract brewers use a brew kettle that can only boil 25–50% of the final beer volume. Termed a concentrated boil, the melanoidin reactions are more pronounced in worts of such high gravity. To make matters worse, extract manufacturers increase the melanoidin concentration during production, and the oxidation of melanoidins can continue during storage. This is sometimes the cause of the so-called “extract tang.” Remedies include using a full wort boil and the lightest extracts obtainabl

So, skip those concentrated boils if you want to make an awesome extract IPA.

Add Gypsum to increase sulfate

I know, I just said to used distilled water to make sure your mineral content is kept in check, but that’s to get us to this point where we can add a small amount of Gypsum without the fear of raising the mineral content in our wort too much.

I like to add 1tsp per 5 gallons, which gives me about 50 ppm of Calcium and ___ sulfate. Enough to boost the sulfate so the hops will pop!

Utilize a hop stand or whirlpool to maximize flavor and aroma from your hops

One of my favorite methods for building an intense and aromatic IPA. Over time, hop additions have moved more and more into the late addition of the boil. Now, home-brewers are putting more and more hops at flame-out and during the whirlpool or hop-stand, to get that punch you in the face aroma and flavor. Since the wort isn’t boiling, yet high enough for temperature for alpha-acid isomerization, you’re not losing those volatile aromatics and oils.

To do a whirlpool you can use either a pump or a spoon. The process is similar to stirring tea in how the tea leaves gravitate towards the center, except in brewing it keeps your hops in a nice center cone. After your whirlpool is going you can begin adding hops, at this point the temperature of your wort is below boiling but above 180. Your still getting isomerization of hops so you’ll need to compensate for this in your recipe. I like to use Beersmith software to do this calculation for me in my recipe.

Specifically for my system, I use a Jaded Cyclone Chiller that allows me to whirlpool and chill at the same time. I’ll knock out after the boil to around 180 and keep my electric kettle boil element set to 180. I typically like to do two additions of hops, so during a 30-minute whirlpool, I’ll add one addition at the beginning and one addition 15 minutes in. After the 30 minutes, I’ll turn on my cooling water to knock the temperature down while it’s still whirlpooling. After another 30 minutes, I shut down the pump and stop the whirlpool to allow a rest period for the solids to settle into a nice compact cone in the center. I am able to get a nice cone even with the electric element in place.

Use a yeast starter and oxygenate

Next, comes one of the most important parts of brewing, the yeast. I’m a firm believer in yeast health being a cornerstone element in brewing great beer. Unhealthy yeast is where the majority of brewing flaws come from, whether it’s diacetyl, acetaldehyde, or phenolics, just to name a few.

To ensure I’m pitching healthy yeast I usually like to use liquid yeast with a

starter. I’ll add my yeast nutrient to the starter and add some to the boil. I typically do 1/2 tsp and split it in 1/2, so 1/4 tsp in the starter and 1/4 in the boil, to ensure I have nutrients like FAN and Zinc. If I’m in a pinch, I’ll use dry yeast, but make sure that I rehydrate and add nutrient to the boil. In this case, I’ll add the 1/2 Tsp. You can even add nutrient to your dry yeast hydration. This is done in wine and mead making, so you’re good to do it for beer making when you forget to throw it in the boil!

Next, when it comes to pitching the yeast, I’ll use my oxygenation setup to deliver adequate oxygen to the wort. The boiling process removes oxygen, and yeast require it in the beginning phases (Lag Phase) to help it grow. I like to use an oxygen stone with those little red oxygen cylinders you get from the hardware stores. I typically open up the valve until I see bubbles coming out of the stone when in solution. Then, I start counting down from 60. It’s not ideal, but since I don’t have a flow meter, it’s what works for me and is repeatable.

Use reliable fermentation temperature control

Now, when I’m talking about temperature control, I’m not talking about that your bathtub or that closet that stays 68 degrees. I can tell you, living in Southeast Georgia, your room temperature can vary drastically. On top of that, active fermentation can rise up to 7 degrees higher than ambient conditions, so when you think you’re fermenting at 68, it actually might be 75 degrees! Another thing that can happen when your fermentation rises that fast is it can also fall that fast. So if your fermentation gets going up to 75, then when fermentation slows the temperature drops down to 68, essentially what you’re doing is signaling to the yeast it’s time to sleep. Next thing you know you didn’t reach your final gravity and you ended up with a sweet beer.

To prevent this, find yourself a used refrigerator and buy a cheap controller from Amazon, like the Inkbird. By taping the temperature probe to the side of your fermenter (with some foam insulation behind it), you will read the actual fermentation temperature within a degree or two.

Eliminate oxygen exposure after fermentation is complete

Oxygen is the enemy of beer, especially post fermentation. If you’re lucky and have a pressurizable vessel, you can transfer your beer while under pressure to reduce your oxygen exposure post fermentation. With a kegging setup, you can go directly from the conical into a keg avoiding oxygen pickup.

Some basic things you can do to prevent post-ferment oxidation:

Get a kegging setup. Even if you can’t transfer under CO2, you can siphon your beer into the keg after it’s purged with CO2. This will greatly improve your beer and reduce oxygen exposure. Bottle beer. As simple as this is, bottling conditioning beer is a great way to remove any oxygen pickup during bottling or packaging. Sierra Nevada uses a version of this technique in their bottled pale ale to reduce dissolved oxygen levels. The yeast during the re-fermentation will eat up oxygen. Borrow a technique from white winemaking circles and use sulfites before packaging to reduce oxidation effects and prevent cardboard flavors from developing. I’m surprised this isn’t used more often, but it’s very common in winemaking to reduce the effects of oxidation in white wines due to the lack of tannins. Red wines don’t have this problem. Just like dark beers, the tannins provide more shelf stability and prevent oxidation effects from occurring over a longer period of time. For 5 gallons, add 1/4 tsp to achieve 50 ppm, after fermentation. This is below the detectable level for sulfur, and you’ll get the added benefit of killing any rogue yeasts that may have made their way into your brew! Drink it fresh! I typically don’t like to have IPA’s past 3 months. After that, they take a turn for the worse. I don’t care how awesome of a brewer you are!

Use fining agents to get that IPA clean and drinkable ASAP

Finally, one of my last tips to brewing an awesome extract is to utilize fining agents such as gelatin or biofine. Some folks may argue to embrace the haze, or that hop oils and aroma get stripped out, but from my experience fining agents allows hoppy beers to condition faster, removing harsh phenols from high hopping rates. I find that if I keg an IPA and carbonate it quickly, without finings, it still takes a week or two for all the flavors to come into balance.

With fining agents, such as gelatin, I can speed up the conditioning process and get an IPA to the point where it’s amazingly fresh, clear and well balanced. I typically add one package of knox gelatin to a small volume of water, about 1 cup. I heat this solution to around 180, allow it to cool, then pour into the keg after transferring the beer from the fermenter. I then bump my CO2 pressure up to 40 psi for 24 hours. At that point I can dump a couple of pints and get clear, hoppy, drinkable beer that would even make Stone Brewing jealous!

Let’s try this out!

I decided to utilize this method of extract brewing for single hop trials. I plan on going full speed in producing 3-gallon batches of single hop extract brews in order to test and evaluate all the hops out there. I hope to create a mental and physical database of every hop, with tasting notes, so that I can build and blend hops for recipes.

Summarizing the steps above I will do the following:

Add yeast nutrient Add Gypsum Adjust pre-boil pH Use a hop stand or whirlpool Use a yeast starter Use temperature control Reduce oxygen exposure, via closed transfer and sulfite additions Use Fining Agents

The recipe I’ll brew is below:

[beerxml recipe=”https://thehopsoul.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/N169.xml” style=”true” /]

Enjoy, and stay tuned to hear more about the N1/69 single hop trial in a future post!

Cheers…….

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