Extracts to all grain

[prince87x]

For my first all grain brew I'm trying to somewhat recreate an extract kit I did into all grain to try and produce similar results. That way it will be familiar and I can draw some comparisons.

The extract kit is Rocky Mountain Amber Ale by Brewcraft. They call for 3 lbs of Golden DME and 2 lbs of Amber DME. The Golden seems pretty strait forward just pale and carapils. The amber seems to be a mixture of pale, caramel 60, and munich. I've read even between different producers of extract there will be small differences too.

What's the best way to approach discerning the amount of pale, caramel 60, and munich?

 

[sptaylor70]

If I recall correctly, BeerSmith has a converter that does it automatically.

But since I don't have BeerSmith, I use Brewer's Friend and do it by hand. So I input the kit ingredients, and came up with OG 1048, IBU 39, SRM 17, pretty close to Brewcraft's values.

Start with the most abundant ingredient (light DME) and convert it to reasonable amounts of pale two-row and CaraPils so that the stats stay about the same as they were before. Then the next most abundant ingredient, and so on. Then eyeball it for red flags (e.g. you don't want your crystal malts to make up more than about 15% of your fermentables, biscuit shouldn't be much more than 5%,), combine similar ingredients to simplify your grain bill.

So I got, with about five minutes of tinkering:

6 lbs. pale two-row
1.5 lbs. Munich light
8 oz. CaraPils
8 oz. C75L
6 oz. Victory
4 oz. Chocolate
OG 1049, IBU 42, SRM 16

I would use US-05, Nottingham, or BRY-97 (not a fan of S-23).

You can spend more time on it, get it really where you want it. Then experiment and see what you can do with it.