How is all grain better than partial mashing?

[markg388]

Remember that not all beer competitions and judges are created equal, I just won best wheat beer with a dunkel lager a couple of weeks back.

If someone wins a competition with a PM or extract beer, more power to him/her I say, the addition of extract to my brews have always detracted from the beer's subtlety. I think that's the word I'm looking for the describes the primary difference between PM and AG, subtlety. There are little taste elements that base malts offer to beer that get covered up easily by things like hops, specialty grains and intensely flavored yeasts. To be fair, I'm a guy arguing from the point of view where most of my beers don't even have specialty grains or late addition hops in them. Even then, all-grain is only slighty better IMO.

 

[shamrockdoc]

This will probably piss some folks off, but I have to say it...

If you can't make a great beer doing partial mash, it's more a reflection of your skills as a brewer than it is on the technique.

Hence learning how to brew with these methods before you jump into 20 gal AG brews still making sub-par beers.


Or am I missing the elitist undertones in your comment

 

[ChshreCat]

Hence learning how to brew with these methods before you jump into 20 gal AG brews still making sub-par beers.


Or am I missing the elitist undertones in your comment

Nope. Quite the opposite. More a reaction to the elitist undertones of others' posts. People's posts that partial mash tastes bad is more a reflection of their beers and not the partial mash method. If you can make a great beer all grain, you can make one just as great doing partial mash with good, quality ingredients.

If you're dumping an old, dusty can of extract into the boil, that's not going to taste good. Same as if you do all grain with stale 2-row that's been sitting out for way too long.

There's nothing that makes AG taste automatically better than PM beyond what might make one AG beer taste better than another AG beer. So if you brewed PM and it tasted bad, and you knew you had good ingredients, then you might want to look at your own process rather than claiming that it was the partial mash's fault.

 

[OLDBREW]

Because you can't taste the difference, so judges need to be warned it's extract so they can score it lower?

I would put extract use as a lesser level of the brewers ability. Like when a brewer uses a short cut of using extract to reach a higher OG, compared to a brewer that achives that specific gravity from scratch. So many inperfections come out from the making of the wort. To dump a can or pouch of instant wort should not be considered into the same classification as brewing from scratch, or AG as it were.

 

[ChshreCat]

I would put extract use as a lesser level of the brewers ability. Like when a brewer uses a short cut of using extract to reach a higher OG, compared to a brewer that achives that specific gravity from scratch. So many inperfections come out from the making of the wort. To dump a can or pouch of instant wort should not be considered into the same classification as brewing from scratch, or AG as it were.

But the argument could be taken even further. Just ripping open a pouch of liquid yeast is much easier than capturing wild yeast and cultivating your own strain. At one point is something a shortcut and shouldn't be allowed? And if the arguments that people are making that adding any amount of extract to your brew makes it taste bad are correct, then that would be reflected in the judges scores anyway.

edit: I think we're wandering off the OP's question. A bunch of us ranting at each other isn't going to help (even if ARE doing it politely), so I'm going to bow out of the thread. If the debate needs to continue, we can do it in another thread.

 

[Reno_eNVy]

Ugh, thank Cthulu nobody has referenced the extract "twang"

Oh, wait..... crap

 

[Northcalais40]

It's better if and only if you prefer to taste only the fruits of your own labor, making beer the way it has been made by immemorial custom since the dawn of time. You might make your own brew by any method and we'll all agree it is awesome or average or less than desirable or what have you. At the end of the day what you have is beer. I for one can't stand the whole beer/wine tasting rhetoric. It all ends up making me think how pretentious it is. Please be aware that I am aware that I'm the ^sshole. I have a low tolerance for bull crap.

 

[markg388]

thanks for playing everyone, i had fun with this thread