Daparish

Recipes 

Brewed one of these on Saturday and from the looks of the wort, it's gonna come out on the darker side. I assume this is because I used extract and let the sugars caramelize too much. I've got an electric stove so my control of the temps are iffy, but I added the extract with the kettle away from the heat, and stirred my arse off to keep sugars from sticking to the bootm of the brew kettle once I reintroduced the heat. Only did a 30 minute boil.

Has anyone had any luck making a Belgian White with extract and getting the to-style white color of the wort? Any advice for me if I make this one in the future? The wort smells great and the fermentation is going nicely as well, but when I pour my friends a glass of Belgian White, i'd like it be more white and less tannish-brown.

Cheers.

tincob

Recipes 

Late extract addition will help some. Full boil volume will also help. You may have to tweak the hop addition to account for the higher bitterness but I actually don't bother.

I've reduced the bitter addition some and just added the reduced amount to the flavor addition.

However at the end of the day, if you are using extracts, you will be hard pressed to get the really light coloring you get from an AG set up. You'll still wind up with good tasting beer though.

I just did a Hoegaarden clone, I'll see how light it comes out in a few weeks.

BrookdaleBrew

Recipes 

beer in the kettle/fermentor is going to appear darker because there is more liquid for light to refract through. Once it's in the glass it will not appear as dark as it does now.

Daparish

Recipes 

I know this to be true, but I'll be surprised if the beer is as light as say a Hooegarten. It appears to muddy brown at this point.

ChshreCat

Recipes 

Actually, I do it all the time. The trick is that I do a large partial mash, boil that and then add extra-light LME at flameout. No need to boil the LME at all if the recipe is designed to only boil the hops with the wort from the mash and just using the LME to make up for the top up water you add later.

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Daparish

Recipes 

Hmmm, did not know that. So in theory, I could've added the 4 lbs of DME at flameout and still hit my OG?

ChshreCat

Recipes 

Sure. So long as it gets fully dissolved, that's all you need to do with extract. It's already been boiled once when it was made. You'll get some extra bitterness from your hops if you don't adjust the recipe to account for the lower concentration in the boil, but that's not hard to do. Or don't if you don't want to bother. I adjust because then I shell out for a little less hops per recipe to get the same beer.

It's easy to tinker with recipes in beersmith to do this. Enter the recipe as it is, then change the extract to be added after the boil. Then readjust the bittering hops until they're back to the IBU's they were at before you changed the extract timing.

I did a writeup on using Beersmith to convert all grain recipes to partial mash with the goal of having the partial boil be a smaller version of the OG's wort, and then adding LME at the end to compensate for the top up water due to the partial boil. Here it is if anyone's interested: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/converting-recipes-partial-mash-partial-boil-beer-smith-142244/

__________________
"Science + beer = good!"
-Adam Savage