Extract vs Low Rent AG

[QuadConPana]

I jumped into BIAB after doing only 3 extract batches. After 3 batches that ran from poor to acceptable, I went back to extract.

The more I read about AG, the more convinced I become that I should stick with extract (with specialty grains) until I can do AG right. It seems pretty easy to replace the main malt with an extract, add specialty grains, and copy damn near any recipe. Working with a nylon bag and turkey fryer just doesn't seem like the best way to achieve the perfect mash temp for the best enzymatic reactions. Meanwhile, I expect the people at Briess, etc. are probably making their DME under pretty well controlled conditions. It just seems like until I can afford a proper HLT and Mash tun, that I probably couldn't do a better job.

Any comments to the contrary?

 

[z-bob]

Working with a nylon bag and turkey fryer just doesn't seem like the best way to achieve the perfect mash temp for the best enzymatic reactions.

Why not?

 

[Scriv]

I did one extract batch then built a cooler mash tun and never looked back. The beer is noticeablely better.

 

[Magnus314]

Are you having trouble hitting mash temps in a turkey fryer? It seems super easy... just use a calc and when the water's the right temp, mash in.

If it's stable temps you're having trouble with, wrap it in a blanket or towel or check temps every 20 minutes and hit it with the burner for a minute if it needs it.

Or don't. Plenty of us don't and it's just fine in the end.

If you really want, but can't afford, a $25 cooler to mash in (they were $20 at Home Depot a few days ago) with the same bag you already have in it, do you intend to make up for that by paying double for extract over AG batches until you "can" afford it?

If you just prefer extract brewing, that's cool.

 

[joshesmusica]

what's your entire process? maybe some experienced people can give you some advice on what to improve on. or if you know where the trouble is coming from, what is the problem? there's tons of great advice on here.
the thing with all grain is that there are some more variables that you need to take into account. i just jumped into all grain myself after having been brewing extract or partial mashes for nearly a year. i can only do 12L batches all grain at the moment, but it's sufficient enough. i've run into an off-flavor issue myself in the first three brews. this time i added some acid malt, and made sure that i wasn't over-pitching (something easily done in three 4L batches), made sure to decant the wort from the starter, and made sure i got a really good boil. i also already had ferment temp control before i stepped into it.

 

[howamidriving]

After a couple partial mash batches in a row I still go back to extract for about half my brews. For me its more about keeping it simple and my brew day quicker. Working 6-7 days a week and having a five year old makes time a scarce commodity.

 

[RM-MN]

After a couple partial mash batches in a row I still go back to extract for about half my brews. For me its more about keeping it simple and my brew day quicker. Working 6-7 days a week and having a five year old makes time a scarce commodity.

I BIAB and have found that with some thought about my methods I have been able to do an all grain batch in the same amount of time as an extract batch but for half the cost and much more control of what goes into my recipes.

 

[QuadConPana]

Do you intend to make up for that by paying double for extract over AG batches until you "can" afford it?

Double is kind of a stretch, isn't it? I grabbed a random recipe from the forums and added up the costs. The necessary DME was a third more expensive. But, when I added in the hops, yeast, and other add ins that were common to both recipes, it was only 10% more expensive.

In another thread, somebody made the great point that a lot of questions here are mostly a function of the fact that a lot of homebrewers don't have anybody to talk about homebrewing with. And, granted, this is probably one.

But I guess what I was getting into was two things. How much room for error is there with AG before my wort is no better than DME?

And, if cheaper AG setups are really that good, why would people blow the money for stuff like this.

I would love to leave the turkey fryer, paint bucket, and water bottle behind. (OK, they aren't exactly a paint bucket and water bottle, but not far off.) The dilemma I have is that I can't decide how big of a step to make as I upgrade. If I had deeper pockets, there wouldn't be a question. But, I hate the idea of upgrading to equipment in steps that are so small that I keep discarding them to upgrade further.

So, I'll keep chewing the virtual fat with my fellow homebrewers while I decide if I want to take baby steps to better beer, or hold my money until I can afford premium equipment.

 

[chudsonvt]

I know a lot of people swear by BIAB, so by all means I am not knocking it. started brewing in February. After an initial 40 hours or more of research, I knew I wanted to skip right to all-grain. I went with a round 5 gallon cooler as my mash tun. The idea of BIAB just did not sit well with me. The cooler sounded, honestly, simpler and more consistent. It is relatively cheap, too. I bought a new cooler for maybe $20 or $25 and then probably about another $30 or so in parts to put on the 3/4" ball valve, a drain hose, and a copper pipe assembly that I sawed into as my manifold. After that initial effort, my brew days go incredibly smoothly.

As for the MegaPot, I would love one. Some of the advantages it would give me would be time savings and the ability to easily do step mashes. However, I am brewing great beer with just my setup. I use one burner, the cooler mash tun and a second cooler as a HLT. Unfortunately I do not have a nice geometry for gravity feeding the HLT for sparging, so I just scoop with a 1 quart measuring cup. Works great.

Take it for what it is, this just works well for me for what I was willing to spend. I will be using it tonight for my 12th batch since February.

 

[FirstAidBrewing]

But I guess what I was getting into was two things. How much room for error is there with AG before my wort is no better than DME?

And, if cheaper AG setups are really that good, why would people blow the money for stuff like this.

You can certainly screw up more with AG. That's where the extra extract cost is; the malting companies have already gone through those steps so you don't need to worry about those foul-ups. However, it's harder than you would think to REALLY screw up an AG batch.

Also, you are also locking yourselves into the wort that is produced. Say you make an extract beer and at the end you think: "if this had just a bit more body/sweetness/dryness/(insert adjective here) then it would be fantastic." Well, tough. AG gives you the ability to make those adjustments and you can't do so with extract.

I guess that's my way of saying with AG you can make small tweaks to make a good beer great.

As to the second part, I think that gets into how much you want to invest in the hobby (i.e. how much do you want brew like a pro with a nano-brewery) as well as convenience. I have a cooler mash tun, which works great, but step mashes are a PITA. The kit you link to above makes things like that easier. I also don't have any sort of tier or pumping system, again not necessary but certainly more convenient than lugging around 5-10 gallons of hot liquids.

 

[d3track]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with extracts, and you can make great beer.

You can also shift your focus to yeast and fermentation management, imho is more important than extract vs all grain

 

[zippy84]

I'm guessing you make good extracts? I have made the jump to partial mash brews now and didn't find there was an upward struggle or learning curve as you describe with AG. With my first PM I also decided to use bottled mineral water as oppose to my usual tap water, which I think has been the single biggest improvement in my setup. Thought my water was fine before since it is drinkable but it turns out when I boil it, it imparts this metallic taste coming from the plumbing. I suppose there could be any number of factors hindering what should be a good brew. Just keep trying new things till it comes good.

My setup is so rudimentary. I don't even bother with a bag even though I'm stove top brewing. Just use a strainer with cheesecloth over it to strain and I mash in a pot under duvets.. works great. I have found PM fool proof so far after 3 brews... probably because I use all the calculators going, i.e. calculating strike-water temp, approximate fermentables etc. Then even more basic... when chilling, I use a mixture of ice bath, and immersed wine bottles with frozen water inside (bottles sterilised). I find this gets me down to pitching temps in about 10 mins. I also have some top off water in the fridge in case. Such a basic set up, and yet I've been able to make lovely beer.

Why not try PM before going all out all-grain? I'm pretty inexperienced and it works for me. I'm also lucky that my ambient temperature where I am generally sits between 16C-21C. So my yeast is never stressed out really.

 

[joshesmusica]

I'm guessing you make good extracts? I have made the jump to partial mash brews now and didn't find there was an upward struggle or learning curve as you describe with AG. With my first PM I also decided to use bottled mineral water as oppose to my usual tap water, which I think has been the single biggest improvement in my setup. Thought my water was fine before since it is drinkable but it turns out when I boil it, it imparts this metallic taste coming from the plumbing. I suppose there could be any number of factors hindering what should be a good brew. Just keep trying new things till it comes good.

My setup is so rudimentary. I don't even bother with a bag even though I'm stove top brewing. Just use a strainer with cheesecloth over it to strain. I have found PM fool proof so far after 3 brews... probably because I use all the calculators going, i.e. calculating strike-water temp, approximate fermentables etc. Then even more basic... when chilling, I use a mixture of ice bath, and immersed wine bottles with frozen water inside (bottles sterilised). I find this gets me down to pitching temps in about 10 mins. I also have some top off water in the fridge in case. Such a basic set up, and yet I've been able to make lovely beer.

Why not try PM before going all out all-grain? I'm pretty inexperienced and it works for me. I'm also lucky that my ambient temperature where I am generally sits between 16C-21C. So my yeast is never stressed out really.

so you're taking all the time to scoop out the grains? or are you mashing in a separate vessel than you're boiling in? if you have the bag you need only one vessel, and then you use the strainer to let the bag drip dry while the rest of your wort is heating to a boil.

 

[zippy84]

so you're taking all the time to scoop out the grains? or are you mashing in a separate vessel than you're boiling in? if you have the bag you need only one vessel, and then you use the strainer to let the bag drip dry while the rest of your wort is heating to a boil.

I mash up to 2.5kg of grain in a pot in about 6 litres of water, I have a colander with a hop bag stretched around it sitting over a 2nd pot. I simply empty grains into colander, no scooping involved. This takes 2 goes to get all the grains and wort out through the colander, not much effort, gives me a chance to give them a good squeeze in the hop bag. Then I batch sparge in the first pot with 5 litres sparge water that has been preheated in 2 smaller pots during the mash.. I have plenty of pots to keep things moving along quickly. Don't you need a 2nd pot anyway to sparge, bag or not? I basically have a 5 gallon pot, a 3 gallon pot and some smaller pots to help heat water.

 

[Psylocide]

Review your process... there are tons of people making great AG beers with BIAB.

Is your sanitation good? Are you mashing correctly? Are you calculating volumes accurately? Are you pitching enough yeast? Are you controlling ferm temps?

What exactly was wrong with your batches? Maybe we can provide some assistance.

Just don't blame the method for shortfalls in your process. I've had beers that were made on high-end systems and my BIAB batches are every bit as good.

 

[Schol-R-LEA]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with extracts, and you can make great beer.

You can also shift your focus to yeast and fermentation management, imho is more important than extract vs all grain

Agreed. As I said in another thread yesterday, it is important to have your basic sanitation and fermentation processes down solidly before moving to all-grain; otherwise, the extra effort of doing AG is wasted. I jumped into AG too early myself, and while I've generally had good success, I'm still playing catch-up on some of the details.

@QuadConPana: I doubt that the problems you're having are specifically BIAB related, but since I've never used BIAB, I couldn't effectively judge your procedures even if I knew the details of what you'd done.

 

[kh54s10]

If your process are good you can make equally good beer with any setup. I brew extract on occasion, BIAB on occasion and use my 3 tier HLT, cooler mash tun, BK rig. If I had beers from all three methods and did a blind tasting I would not be able to tell you which was which.

The advantage to extract is simplicity, the advantage to BIAB is low equipment cost. The advantages to all grain is more control over the product and reduced ingredient costs.

 

[chickypad]

Totally agree with the several posts above. I have the expensive 3 vessel system with HERMs that I started all grain with, and still brew occasionally on, but in the last 18 months I have gone almost totally to 3 gal BIAB batches. The quality of my beer if anything has gone up, probably just with more experience in general. If your all grain beers are not good I would suspect something like water and mash pH as the culprit way before missing a few degrees in mash temp - are you paying attention to water at all? You will need to a little investigation to really do that right, but you can start simply by at least following the instructions in the water primer.

Of course there's nothing wrong with brewing extract if you are happy with your beer and the process. Saving money on ingredients is probably the least important reason IMO to brew all grain - for me it's more about having control and just enjoying the entire process. As far as system/set up that's more about personal preference and not about better beer. There is a lot of help on here about how to maintain mash temps, etc., if you want to explore your current system more. There are some nice pics around of insulated kettles. You might also consider trying a few smaller stovetop batches, which I imagine you could do with your old extract equipment. That's my SOP - 3 gal BIAB in my old 5 gal pot, stick the mash in an oven preheated to 170 and turned off, no babysitting the mash and zero temp loss.

 

[mkyl428]

Review your process... there are tons of people making great AG beers with BIAB.

Just don't blame the method for shortfalls in your process. I've had beers that were made on high-end systems and my BIAB batches are every bit as good.

+10000

BIAB can make every bit as good of a beer as one of those high end systems. The beer I make via BIAB stands up to commercial beers in quality and flavor.

 

[zippy84]

+10000
The beer I make via BIAB stands up to commercial beers in quality and flavor.

Same as that. Since my last batch of IPA ran out (very quickly), I've been buying a few different well known British and Irish IPAs from the store whilst I await my next batch. I have to say I enjoyed mine more than what I've tasted from the store... and mine are almost a quarter of the price. Tbh though, I'm not sure I've nailed the 'typical IPA profile' yet though, I'm not even sure what that is... although I know it involves a lot of hop variation, I'm pretty new to IPA. Only been drinking them the last 4 or 5 months. I think my last batch (although from a good recipe) was a little too malt forward for an IPA, mashed a little high I think. Also a little light on the alcohol scale.

 

[z-bob]

The best beers that I've made were partial mash; I would mash 5 pounds of 2-row and specialty grains, sparge them in big pasta strainer (or maybe it's a tamale steamer), and add LME to boost the gravity to make a 5 gallon batch. That was a long time ago.

I started BIAB about 6 months ago so I can do full mashes without buying a lot of new equipment (BIAB didn't exist yet in the US when I was brewing before) I'm still dialing-in my process and my beer is getting a lot better with each new batch. And I'm having fun. I also like paying considerably less than $1 per pound for malt.

If you're having fun doing extract beers, and you like the results, good job; it doesn't matter what any of us think. So I'm not sure what the point of this thread is.