Dme

I've been looking at a bunch of recipes and some of them say to use X amount of DME. I know it means dry malt extract but is it referring to light, amber, or dark DME?

Unless it says otherwise, use light.

Usually if you see just DME it's going to be some type of light version. But not all light DME is created equal so it still my be worth asking for some feedback if you find a recipe you like.

When I am formulating any extract with grain recipes I ALWAYS base it around Extralight DME, then I get all my flavor and color complexity from my steeping (or partial mashing) grains. That way you get to use more and varied grains.

For example, let's say you are making an amber ale....If you based it around amber extract, you have very little room to get complexity from roasted or crystalized grains.....you run the risk of muddying the flavor and ending up too dark for your recipe.....

Staying with my Amber example...The Srm range for that style is SRM: 10 – 17 so if your base extract already puts you into 14 srms, you son't have much room to move around it....you may be able to sneak in a pound of crystal 30 let's say in it.

But if your Extralight DME has a color of 5 SRMs, you can really get into the recipe and play around with different combinations of grains until you get into the right color and Og range for the style.

And that will also get you a deeper, more complex flavor.

It's kind of like making model airplanes....remember the "snap together" types that you started out with? You had maybe 8 pieces; 2 body halves two front wings, 2 rear wings and maybe 2 pieces for a cockpit, or two pieces for landing gear...

But if you got one of those 500 piece b52 bomber kits....you had a much more complex final product.

Another way to think about it, and something that will help if you start brewing all grain is that you consider your extralight dme as your basemalt, like 2-row or Maris Otter is in AG. In fact it pretty much IS just like those grains in terms of amount of fermentables and srms (color.) Pretty much everything else in your recipe is for color and flavor depth. In fact you can pretty much convert any AG or Extract with grains recipe either way, by simply swapping out the base (whether it's extract or two row) with the right amount of the other thing.

Converting Grains to Malt Extract

For the first step, convert your base malt to extract. The base malt is easy to identify as it is the largest ingredient in the beer – typically 5-10 lbs of pale malt. For example, let’s look at an all-grain ale with 8 lbs of pale malt and 1 lb of crystal malt. The simplest base malt conversion is to just multiply the number of pounds of pale male by 0.75 to get the pounds of liquid extract. Therefore 8 pounds of pale malt becomes 6 pounds of liquid extract.

An equivalent conversion for dry extract is 0.6, so 8 pounds of pale malt becomes 4.8 pounds of dry malt.

Click to expand...

And then you would tweak the amount of specialty grains to match the srms and gravity. Some speciality grains are mashable in ag recipes, but even those can be steeped for flavor and color. You just need to tweak everything else till the numbers match.

Revvy said:

When I am formulating any extract with grain recipes I ALWAYS base it around Extralight DME, then I get all my flavor and color complexity from my steeping (or partial mashing) grains. That way you get to use more and varied grains.

For example, let's say you are making an amber ale....If you based it around amber extract, you have very little room to get complexity from roasted or crystalized grains.....you run the risk of muddying the flavor and ending up too dark for your recipe.....

Staying with my Amber example...The Srm range for that style is SRM: 10 – 17 so if your base extract already puts you into 14 srms, you son't have much room to move around it....you may be able to sneak in a pound of crystal 30 let's say in it.

But if your Extralight DME has a color of 5 SRMs, you can really get into the recipe and play around with different combinations of grains until you get into the right color and Og range for the style.

And that will also get you a deeper, more complex flavor.

It's kind of like making model airplanes....remember the "snap together" types that you started out with? You had maybe 8 pieces; 2 body halves two front wings, 2 rear wings and maybe 2 pieces for a cockpit, or two pieces for landing gear...

But if you got one of those 500 piece b52 bomber kits....you had a much more complex final product.

Click to expand...

Revy, how come you always make so much sense? Gotta go w/dis idea.

Thanks