You can dip your toe in the wort with a $40 test batch, learn how the entire process works from the bottom up, and then decide what your next move should be.Dr. In my next post, I'll explain how to do this easily and on the cheap. If you find the mashing onerous and want to go to extract brewing, at least you're making that call, and it's an informed decision.Įxtract brewing is fine, but it's not the place you should start. You can get into brewing for a relatively small up-front cost and see if it's for you. If you're willing to experiment with one-gallon batches, it changes everything. But there's no reason to start with that much beer. It's not actually a cheap way to brew your first five-gallon batch of beer it's just cheaper than the equivalent all-grain set-up.īut why brew five gallons? That volume has become standardized, so everything is keyed toward making beer in five-gallon tatches. Homebrew starter kits-invariably assembled for extract brewing-are themselves relatively spendy (usually around $200), and most either end up unused in the basement or require major overhaul during the upgrade to regular, all-grain brewing. You have a lot more control with all-grain, which for the homebrewer who is fussy about his hobby (and beer), is a huge advantage.įair enough, you might say, but a full all-grain set-up is a pricey commitment, so why not start with extract and then scale up if I want to tackle all-grain? This is usually the main reason people start with extract. (I have a very crude set-up compared to the kinds of rocketships you can build-but aren't required to-if you wish.) Extract brewing saves a bit of time, but not that much you only need 60-90 minutes more to make a regular batch of beer with regular malt. In mashing you control the fermentability of your wort, meaning you can make it thinner or thicker, sweeter or drier.Īnd if the ingredients and equipment for making extract brewing have improved since the 80s, they've gotten even more impressive on the all-grain side. Brewers can now choose from among many different base malt types beyond the dozens of specialty malts. So much of the beer's character is built in the mash. It robs the brewer of the ability to finely tune his recipe, and worse, makes it impossible for him to shape his beer through different mashing techniques. So what are the downsides? Making extract beer is like baking cake with a cake mix. The extract allows brewers to skip the mashing stage and save time. Yeast is perhaps the biggest improvement, and that alone allows homebrewers to make beer of professional quality. We can now buy high-quality hops, packaged fresh in oxygen-free containers. If you want to do an extract brew, you can get quality syrups or dry powder and add sachets of crushed specialty grain for more complexity. Things have changed a lot since the 1980s. Now, with homebrew shops in most towns, and virtual ones populating the internet, there’s no reason to whip up bathtub beer. In my interviews with Rob and Kurt Widmer, they both described the dire state of the moment. As recently as the late 1970s and early 80s, the ingredients homebrewers had access to were terrible. Homebrew from distant decades was notoriously bad, for pretty obvious reasons.įor decades, the only reliable way to make beer at home for many hobbyists was extract. (“ Don’t add yeast and water,” they’d advise as a way of instruction.) Some of the original kits were as easy as dumping the syrups into warm water and pitching dry packets of (often bread) yeast. They made the powders and syrups as a way of keeping their equipment in service, and sold them to customers with a wink and a nod. The invention probably dates back to Prohibition, when breweries were looking for ways to continue production without making beer. The process involves a product called malt extract-a distillate of wort boiled down either to a thick syrup or fine dust. What I'd like to argue, though, is that when you start, you should start with all-grain.Įxtract brewing has one sole, small advantage but other major disadvantages. With the products available today, you can make fine beer that way. Most of the homebrewing world is geared to introduce newbies to homebrewing by a method called “extract brewing.” I'm an unusual partisan here: I have absolutely no problem with extract brewing as a method of making beer. (As if an excuse is needed.) Let's start the discussion with an age-old dilemma: if you're looking to get into the hobby, should you start with extract brewing or all-grain? I'm off to today to the American Homebrew Association conference in Minneapolis, and that seems like a perfect excuse to launch a week or so of homebrew blogging.
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