Do professional breweries ever use extract?

[Carl66]

Not sure where you heard this, but it has to be flawed. With the amount of guinness sold, it would be incredibly expensive to use malt extract, especially hopped malt extract, given that they probably do use hop extract. And according to guinness themselves "All the GUINNESS® sold in the UK, Ireland and North America is brewed in Ireland at the historic St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin."

And how do you figure that they haven't been Irish for long, "1759 -
Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000 year lease on a disused brewery at St. James’s Gate, Dublin for an initial £100 and an annual rent of £45." 250 years seems like a while to me.

Correct . Irish through and through .Irish employees Irish recipe Irish ingredients what more is needed

 

[McMullan]

Irish recipe? Guinness? Pretty sure Arthur Guinness was brewing something based on London Porter, after receiving a few tips from an established London Porter brewer who moved to Dublin.

 

[mashpaddled]

Some of the real small brewpubs use extract because they don't have the resources to brew from grain. That can be a space limitation or a lack of labor to brew all day and run a taproom and/or restaurant. When you run a small brewing operation that kicks out twenty gallon or smaller batches you spend a lot of time brewing if you're making sales. Simply no way to brew twelve or more hours every day, run a bar and run everything else involved with a restaurant. These smaller operations are less common than they used to be. They've either grown up or squeezed out by larger breweries.

You will find more breweries than you think keep DME on hand for when a mash doesn't go as well as it should. Easier to throw in some DME to hit preboil gravity than boil down to the right gravity.

I hear some of the breweries pumping out pastry stouts add DME to backsweeten their beers. Obviously requiring yanking the yeast out. I'm not sure how true that it but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[50calshooter]

I was just wondering whether malt extract was ever used by professional breweries or is really just a homebrewer thing? just something ive been curious about....

Yes. There are places that do all extract brewing and there are places that use DME as "additives"

 

[Slim M]

Sort of off topic but I think a few of the large operations during prohibition stayed afloat making large cans of hopped malt extract marketed as a nutritional product . I’m for sure I have seen a can of Pabst syrup in my day someplace.