Making your own LME

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DeadYetiBrew

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Has anyone out there made their own LME via all grain? Using LME is so easy, but unfortunately there aren't many malt options out there. Could I mash, sparge, and boil for a few minutes a bunch of grain for a high gravity sweet wort and store it to use as LME for multiple batches later? It's almost 3am, and the later it gets the more I envision a sort of sweet wort dispensing wonderland in a spare closet, maybe a 25 gallon drum of 1.090 pale malt sweet wort, a few gallons of biscuit, vienna, different crystals, some chocolate, special b, etc, etc, all in sweet wort (LME) form that I could just measure out, boil, and add hops to whenever I've got a spare hour. My MLT is big enough to get 15 gallons of fairly high gravity pale ale wort, and I think it would last me at least a little while. How long do you think said sweet wort could last in an air tight HDPE container at room temperature? My lofty idea here is to possibly have 10-20, 1-2 gallon test batches going at a time and only mashing one weekend a month. Am I insane? Could that work?
 
I agree, LME beers do have a noticeable taste. Plus, you'd have to do a lot of boiling to get that molasses type consistency.
 
LME avoids infection because it has such high sugar content that nothing can really grow in it directly - sort of like syrup or honey. wort at like 1.090 would not have such an advantage.

I think it would be too much hassle to keep from getting infected. I'm sure it could be done but it'd be very disappointing to have it go bad on you after you just went through the effort to make a ton of it.
 
I wouldn't be going for the consistency of molasses, it would be more like pre-boil wort than real LME...I guess it would just be LM. Yeah, I didn't really know what gives extract that twang. They don't necessarily taste stale, they just have that one off flavor. Is that because of some manufacturing process, additive, or just the nature of the beast?
 
I just think that you'd need to get a syrupy consistency for the sugar content to be high enough to stave off infection. If it was at 1.090 or so, you'd have to keep it real sterile, plus, at 1.090, it's really only 2x concentrated for a 1.045 beer.
 
It would be extremely difficult to prevent the wort from spoiling, unless you freeze it. The SG of LME is around 1.450.
 
I would be careful to sanitize everything well as usual, but would infection really be that big of a deal since it is pre-boil? I've heard of some people with an old can of LME skimming a majority of an infection off the top then throwing it in the boil as usual and that takes care of the rest of the nasties.

I just think it would be wicked to do 5 different 2 gallon batches in the amount of time it normally takes me to do a single 5 gallon batch. How cool would it be to enter a different beer into each category of a homebrew competition?

But then again how long would it take me to go through 10 lbs of the less common grains that I would want to use like Aromatic malt? Maybe as long as a year? That's too long. But on the other hand I could do small test batches with minimal cost, waste, time, and cleanup. Then it would be real easy for me to try the same recipe with a little more wheat the next month.

I'm still undecided on the matter...freshness and enzyme conversion of the lower diastatic grains being my biggest concerns. I'm not having any luck finding someone out on the interweb that has tried this before. I refuse to accept the common sense logic that if no one is doing it, it's probably for a good reason. I much rather consider myself the future father of a homebrewing revolution!
 
You would want to boil it at least for some short time to stop conversion and sanitize. Papazian writes about making up storable wort for starters and is very adament about sanitation. You really have to keep it from fermenting.

By the way, as soon as you extract sugars from converted malt, no matter how diluted it is, you have LME. It's just that the LME they sell is more concentrated.

Perhaps you can do other things to reduce your brewday times.
 
DeadYetiBrew said:
I would be careful to sanitize everything well as usual, but would infection really be that big of a deal since it is pre-boil? I've heard of some people with an old can of LME skimming a majority of an infection off the top then throwing it in the boil as usual and that takes care of the rest of the nasties.

Right, but the concern isn't just the bacteria themselves, it's also the chemicals/flavors/odors they leave behind when they do their work.

With LME you'll mainly only get infection on the surface from what I've heard, due to some moisture getting in there and creating a thin layer of more dilute solution on the very surface which the nasties can grow in. Skimming the surface takes most of the bacteria, and likely most of the nasty chemicals/flavors they've created.

In your semi-concentrated wort, an infection could infect the whole thing - it could ferment/convert a whole lot of sugar in there and leave all sorts of nasty substances. Though you're boiling it when you brew with it, eliminating chance of infecting your final beer, if there are nasty compounds and off flavors (as commonly associated with infections), boiling may not get rid of them.

Isn't that basically how sour beer is made? letting the natural bacteria from barley infect the wort for a day or two, souring it, and then when you boil it to start the brewing process it kills off the bacteria, leaving the sour flavor? I'd think you'd get the same thing, only you wouldn't have such huge quantities of bacteria to begin with so it'd probably take a lot longer than 2 days, but who knows what kind of nasty flavors/smells you'd get...

Similar to the idea of canning small quantities of wort for making starters, you could likely make this work if you could bottle your wort in big jugs (half gallon or gallon or so) and manage to pasteurize the wort in the bottle - maybe if you've got a huge brew pot you could put a few jugs in over some boiling water and let them bathe in the steam for a while? This may not get hot enough without being pressurized, which is likely why they use pressure cookers to can wort. But if you've got a gigantic pressure cooker lying around that would fit a few glass gallon jugs inside... ;)
 
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