Over Malting... Is there such thing.

[JoseLima]

What happens when you over malt your wort??

 

[emmdubb23]

Your going to have to explain what you mean. Did you mean your gravity was high?

 

[gelatin]

You get a higher ABV and a sweeter beer.

 

[Ogri]

Depending on how much malt you use/overuse it will taste sickly/cloyingly sweet and you'll bump up the ABV. Also, if you're talking about using more malt than is called for in the recipe you're trying to simulate, it will knock your beer out of balance and away from the style. You'd probably need to increase the number of IBUs you'd get from the hop schedule by doing larger additions or longer periods of time with the hops in the boil.

 

[Yooper]

"Overmalting"? Malting is when the barley is germinated. "Overmalting" would mean growing the plants. I think that maybe I'm misintrepreting what you're talking about.l

 

[Rickthescot]

Isn't that when birds loose a lot of feathers?

 

[JoseLima]

Your going to have to explain what you mean. Did you mean your gravity was high?

Say recipe calls for a 6lbs of malt extract and i put double 12lbs but i leave say amount of yeast.

 

[Ogri]

Say recipe calls for a 6lbs of malt extract and i put double 12lbs but i leave say amount of yeast.

If I'm understanding your example correctly, and this was for a 5 gallon recipe, hypothetically, you'd probably be needing to use a yeast strain that could tolerate a high alcohol environment, and make sure that you were pitching enough of that yeast, so that it didn't get overly stressed and/or stall out your fermentation part way through. You may, or may not, be able to get away with exactly doubling the original hop weights and doing the same boil schedule so it'd be a good idea to put your intended numbers and ingredients into some recipe calculator, like beer calculus. This will let you see how un/balanced (malt sweetness to hop bitterness) the recipe would turn out, so you could change the quantities to suit. You can also enter a style you are trying to achieve and it will give you the numbers (OG, FG, IBUs, SRM etc,) to aim for.

 

[looneybomber]

If you upped the base malt just a little, you should be fine so long as you know it'll be a little maltier. If you doubled your base malt, then, in addition to upping your hops to match the increased base malt, you will want more speciality grain too since they give a lot of flavor. You will also have to pitch more yeast assuming it can handle the increased AbV.

 

[GASoline71]

You will have a very sweet hopless beer. If you were trying for some weird high ABV beer... that's not the way to go about it. At least not how I would go about it.

Gary

 

[JoseLima]

Thank you guys for all this great info..