Mashing Extract?

As I understand it, DME and LME are just boiled down mashes of grains. Usually these are added after steeping in extract brewing when the temperature is too high for conversion.

If the ME is added before or shortly after steeping can conversion occur if you want to tone down the malt profile?

Arrheinous said:

As I understand it, DME and LME are just boiled down mashes of grains. Usually these are added after steeping in extract brewing when the temperature is too high for conversion.

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This is not quite how it's done. Boiling down the extract with heat would promote unwanted carmelization. They boil the extract by putting the wort in a vacuum. To make DME, they spray the wort until the dry particles fall.

Arrheinous said:

If the ME is added before or shortly after steeping can conversion occur if you want to tone down the malt profile?

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To convert the sugars into fermentables, you need enzymes to hydrolise starches. These enzymes occur naturally in germinating grain. Maltsters germinate barley and then dry them out so that they don't grow. After that, they might kiln or roast the barley. This usually denatures nearly all of the enzymes.

Extract lacks this enzyme. You wouldn't be able to further break down the maltose without other enzymes, such as that found in Beano.

Typically, you want to use extract that has the lightest color available. The malt character of these extracts are subtle enough to produce lite lagers and cream ales. If you want something with even less malt character, you can substitute corn sugar, sucrose, honey, rice syrup solids, or other adjuncts. These may change the character of your beer by making it drying and imparting other flavors.

A common recommendation, from both books and this community, is to use light or extra light extract in almost all extract brews. This allows you to control both the color and flavor of your beer. Furthermore, extract is ready to go. You only need to pasteurize it. This means that you can add it at or near the end of your boil and prevent the boil from darkening the beer.

Use common sense. Mashing extract would have no real purpose. It has already been converted from starch to sugar and then Boiled. It also lacks the required enzymes for further conversion, if possible.

Well, with the emzymes from a base malt you could probably break the remaining complex sugars down some more. But the question is, would you really want to?

DrunkleJon said:

Well, with the emzymes from a base malt you could probably break the remaining complex sugars down some more. But the question is, would you really want to?

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But how would the enzymes be active after the extract is processed? Just like once you boil your wort, you denature the enzymes, the same would be true of extract.

"Mashing" extract would only reduce the amount of sugars in the final product, as the extract's sugars good very well stick to the grain and give a lower amount of sugars in the wort than you started with. There wouldn't be enzymatic activity, any more than adding honey to the mash would give enzymatic activity. The conversion of starches to sugars happens due to enzymes.

Oh gosh I forgot about the enzymes. I was assuming that there was some modest contribution from the complex sugars being hydrolyzed at elevated temperatures.

I've used the very light dry malt extract for everything once I learned about how you get darker colors. I wasn't sure if you went too light then people start bleaching the grains or what. Used the very light DME and a low L Crystal on my pumpkin ale and much of the brown-orange color from the roasted pumpkin was allowed to shine through in the end-product.

Moving out of extract brewing soon enough (when I find the time between this and that and the other thing :cross. This question was just sort of a way to bridge the gap, conceptually, from extract to all-grain and transition from thinking about malt from the perspective I already have.

Arrheinous said:

Oh gosh I forgot about the enzymes. I was assuming that there was some modest contribution from the complex sugars being hydrolyzed at elevated temperatures.

I've used the very light dry malt extract for everything once I learned about how you get darker colors. I wasn't sure if you went too light then people start bleaching the grains or what. Used the very light DME and a low L Crystal on my pumpkin ale and much of the brown-orange color from the roasted pumpkin was allowed to shine through in the end-product.

Moving out of extract brewing soon enough (when I find the time between this and that and the other thing :cross. This question was just sort of a way to bridge the gap, conceptually, from extract to all-grain and transition from thinking about malt from the perspective I already have.

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The grain isn't bleached- you just use light colored grain to make light colored beers.

Partial mashing is a great way to bridge the gap between extract and all-grain and it makes awesome beers as well.

We can help you with partial mashing for your next batch. It's super easy to do, and just involves using a bit of base malt instead of some of the extract.

I've got 20# of amber/pale malt sitting in the kitchen ready to try out the AG process. It's a braggot recipe that's also going to use 2# honey (not going by the 51% thing) and liquid Wyeast 1986.

Been using a 62qt kettle for extracts and there's a 64qt cooler mash tun that I haven't used yet waiting upstairs in the brew room. I think I might be able to get away with my old 16qt brew pot to finish up the three-pot system.

I want this to come out at around 10%+ because other brews have fallen a % short of the intended mark (but they've tasted fine). Not sure if that's going to be an easy task for my first full AG (I did Scherlenka's AG Quaffable Irish Red as a BIAB). The problem with the other batches was probably just impatience and the house being too cold.

isn't the whole point of using an extract to avoid the mash/sparge process and have more consistency in the wort?

i don't understand how "mashing" extract does anything except take time

Arrheinous said:

I've got 20# of amber/pale malt sitting in the kitchen ready to try out the AG process. It's a braggot recipe that's also going to use 2# honey (not going by the 51% thing) and liquid Wyeast 1986.

Been using a 62qt kettle for extracts and there's a 64qt cooler mash tun that I haven't used yet waiting upstairs in the brew room. I think I might be able to get away with my old 16qt brew pot to finish up the three-pot system.

I want this to come out at around 10%+ because other brews have fallen a % short of the intended mark (but they've tasted fine). Not sure if that's going to be an easy task for my first full AG (I did Scherlenka's AG Quaffable Irish Red as a BIAB). The problem with the other batches was probably just impatience and the house being too cold.

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were it me, and i had a mess of each, i would find a partial mash (or group of partial mash) recipe and find a fun way to use them both at the same time

Arrheinous said:

I want this to come out at around 10%+ because other brews have fallen a % short of the intended mark (but they've tasted fine). Not sure if that's going to be an easy task for my first full AG (I did Scherlenka's AG Quaffable Irish Red as a BIAB). The problem with the other batches was probably just impatience and the house being too cold.

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It's common for all-grain brewers to add extract to make bigger than normal beers.

Since I only do Pm's now, I'm glad to get away from all that extract, with Pm's all is used is a small milk carton of it that I add at flame out.......No more extract twang for me !!!..........

You won't get extract twang via partial mash even if you use 65% extract... Assuming it's fresh and your recipe is good.

I did the whole AG deal tonight. Just finished up cleaning. From what I can tell I've got 5.5 gallons in primary now at 1.064 (from a desired 1.100), which is 63% brewhouse efficiency with having 6 or 6.5 gallons of wort total by the end of the boil from 16# amber and 4# pale (UK). I didn't take a pre-boil gravity reading.

Was going to do all this last night but the MLT was leaking so I used about a yard of teflon tape to wrap the original cooler gasket from the spigot I pulled out to make it watertight. Now there might only be one or two drips were hour and I'm sure the wort isn't getting into the insulation in the cooler walls.

Mashed at 152 for 60 minutes, batch sparged with water at 200F (ended up with 178F water in the MLT but added a gallon to cold water to get 168F for sparging). 90 minute boil. Took some of the extra sparge runoff and boiled it down to produce sort of caramel/chocolate taste to it since the grain bill was pretty simple.

Waited twenty minutes after chilling to clarify the wort going into the fermenter (something I haven't been doing) and now it looks pretty clear.

I overestimated the evaporation rate - to get a good boil I need to close the lid which brings it down to -1 gallon/hour. Right now I'm just putting the big pot over two burners but I'm going to need insulation or a propane burner to fix this. (I'm thinking of two halves of an insulating cylinder shape that can be huge from the handles and removed when I need to move the pot without extra weight.)

That seems like the lowest rate I've seen when I was looking up rates. This means that I won't be able to take advantage of higher sparge volumes since I can't get the wort down during a 60/90 minute boil.

Despite a low efficiency I've figured out a bunch of parameters for my setup and gotten a bit of experience for next time. 63% doesn't seem like that low a number for a first attempt (especially since I ended up with maybe 1.5 gallons more wort than I wanted) and it gives me something to work on. The whole process took maybe 6 hours and this was with a 90 minute boil.

unionrdr said:

Actually,it's more common for them to use a little extract to hit their OG number if it's off enough.

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Yeah, it becomes the same thing except that fixing your OG might not be planned.

ludomonster said:

It's common for all-grain brewers to add extract to make bigger than normal beers.

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Isn't that a partial mash?

If not, what exactly is a partial mash?

Partial Mash and All-Grain brewing is pretty much the same thing except for, as uniondr said, proportions. Generally, if you can't mash all of your grain, you'll need to suppliment it with extract.

You're limited by how much water you can boil. Many all grain brewers can boil as much as 7.5 gallons (boiling it down to 5). That water comes from the mash liquor and the water used to sparge. Depending on your process, these have various volumes. If you have to use sparge water that you can't recirculate, you might only have half (wild guess) of those 7.5 gallons available for mashing. The grain-to-water ratio should be between 1 and 1.33 lbs/qt to mash. So if you have 4 gallons of mash water, you might be able to mash 16 -20 lbs of grain. If you have 85% brewhouse efficiency, you could get a 1.102 OG wort from mashing 16lb of pale malt. If your efficiency is less than that, you could miss the mark. But if you had 2-3 lbs of specialty grains in your beer, your OG could end up in the 80-90 point range.

Unfortunately, high gravity beers tend to mash at lower efficiencies; you might only get 60%, depending on your system. While the All-Grain brewer may be able to crank out 1.050 beers without using extract, it becomes a serious consideration when it comes time for that barleywine.

Ah okay, that seems like what I ended up with. 20 pounds of grain, ~60% efficiency, so there seems to be diminishing returns (the problem of scaling things up).

I'm still going to add 2 or 4 pounds of honey in secondary so we'll see where that puts me with an OG of 1.064. I'll keep this in mind for next time.