Help for new brewer

I've recently made a few batches of beer from complete kits but now I am experimenting with different ingredients. My biggest question is this- if I make a 5-6 gallon batch what is a good general rule as to how much malt extract I should use? I made a batch from hopped malt extract 3.3 lbs along with 3.3 lbs of unhopped malt extract. I have not tasted it yet. Is 3.3 lbs of UME equal to approximately 1 kilo of sugar? Thanks for the help.

Howdy 'jwm',

Use, for a 5 gallon batch:
6-7 Lbs DME, or 8-9 Lbs of LME.
You can make it weaker but that is a lot of work for 'weak beer'.
You could also make it stronger but '8 Lbs of DME',
or '10 Lbs of LME' would be kinda strong first thing in the morning
or in the hot Texas summer time.

6 Lbs of DME, ie. {dried malt extract}
will, {in 5 gallons} make, 4.9% alcohol,
{Shiner bock beer is 4.75.}
7 Lbs of DME, = 6% alcohol,
8 Lbs of DME, =6.75% alcohol.

LME ie. {liquid Malt extract}
is syrup so it is heaver than the dried ' DME.'
use 20% more for the same result.
And what is 'UME' ?


J. Knife

I think UME is Unhopped Malt Extract from what I take from his post. This would be the same as just regular old Liquid Malt Extract (LME) that you or most of us refer to.

He used some pre-hopped malt extract and some normal (unhopped) extract to brew his batch as opposed to all unhopped and the use of fresh hops (pellets or otherwise).

To the OP, I'd recommend just using all Unhopped Malt extract (dry or liquid as noted by Jack) and adding your own hops in the correct quantities. It will add another step or two to your brewing process (adding hops at various parts of the boil, straining them out or putting them in a grainbag, etc.), but using fresh hops will undoubtedly taste better if done correctly than the prehopped extracts that have sat on the shelf forever.

I personally would stay away from the hopped malt extracts and add your own hops to the beer you are brewing. You can get a pretty good idea of the amount of extract required for a desired batch of beer using the point system for your calculations. The way I understand it is that as general rule is you get 45 GU (gravity units ) from DME and 36 from LME. This is per gallon of wort.
Let's say your recipe needs a starting OG of 1.053 for a 5 gallon batch. You multiply the last 2 numbers of the OG , in this case 53 by the number of gallons of wort. Then divide that number by the GU of the extract.

53*5 = 265 -- divide 265/by 36 for LME = 7.36 pounds of LME extract.
Hope this helps.

Hmm... I've never really seen the gravity units approach/calculation brought up on the board before (granted I've only been here 4-6 weeks), but that's pretty good information.

This book is worth getting if you like a mathematical approach to brewing. There are all sorts of handy formulas in there.

ayrton said:

This book is worth getting if you like a mathematical approach to brewing. There are all sorts of handy formulas in there.

Click to expand...

Yep, that is where I got my information.

Thanks; will look into it.

Thanks for the advise everyone.