Perfecting your extract brewing technique

Brewing your own beer, hand made beer, is one of the most rewarding and inexpensive creative hobbies you would ever hope to find and could ever hope to enjoy.

Using basic techniques derived from brewing K&K and K&B there's a big chance that you're going to develop a non-optimal work flow and tire yourself of the hobby. The reason for this is that between the hop boil, the steep and the malt boil it's quite possible to over-work yourself. I was guilty of it, but by taking a moment longer to think the process through it's possible to reduce your workload, reduce the total boil volume and therefore shorten the time to cool the concentrated wort to pitching temperature.

Here's a concise technique that will save you time and money:


The Hop Boil
Obviously, as an extract brewer (or a partial dude or an AG'er), hops are a critical part of the process. However, this is where time and effort can be trimmed and enhance your result.

First off, extracting the hops - the prime purpose of the hop boil - works better is they are boiled in a mini-wort of around SG=1040. The easiest way to achieve that is to put 100 grams per litre of liquid malt (or 80 gm per litre of dry malt) onto the boil and then commence your hopping schedule. Higher SG meads to less efficient extraction, lower is better but 1040 is a happy number that is proven to work. Adjust it to suit your preference through experience.

If you do this with say two litres of water (you could even use one litre if you're a watchful chap as the evaporation can be a bit severe at smaller volumes) and 200 gm of liquid malt, then it's a far smaller thermal mass to deal with and you have the chance to strain out the hops when you pour off the completed boil to your main boiling pot (the big one!).

It can take quite a while to get your malt to the boil. After all, 3.5 kg of liquid malt is quite a big job for small gas burner or an electric stove. So while your hop boil is in progress, weigh out your malt and start the heat under it gently. Strain off the hop boil result into the malt and increase to full heat to get it up to the boil.

Which brings us to...


The Steep
This is just the stage where you steep any specialty grains (Carapils, etc) and then sparge (rinse) those into your big pot.

Usually, this is about twenty to thirty minutes at around 70C. If you bring your water up to say 72C, add the grain, put the lid back on the pot and turn the flame off then you're on a winner.

Just like the hop boil, strain out the liquid into the big pot with the malt and then sparge with warm water to wash out any remaining sugars and desirable elements. Don't use boiling water for the sparge as you may introduce tannins to the wort. Tannins are that mouth-drying, puckering sensation you get from overbrewed tea and some some red wines. Not a good thing in beer.



The Boil
By now, the pot containing the malt, hop extract and the steep should be coming close to the boil. Keep a lid on it so that it can reach the boil sooner and so that you don't get caramelisation of the malt. Stay near by and check it often as when it hits the boil with the lid on it can and usually does try to exit the pot in a column of sticky, sticky foam. Let my mistake be your advantage.

Let the whole lot boil for fifteen minutes so that you can be certain that it's all nice and sterile.


At the end of the boil, you have somewhere between 7.5 and 12 litres of boiling, sticky liquid. Using some other methods, you could have more than 15!

You can either let it cool naturally or you can help it along. It's up to you. There are practical advantages and risks in both approaches, but we can talk about that another time.


Happy Brewing!!

Cheers!!