Brewing with Malt Extract

By Calvin Perilloux

Almost every beginning brewer starts out using malt extract, and some stick with it, but most move on to the all-grain process and many never look back. Seen as a beginner’s step, extract brewing has received a bit of a bad rap from many experienced brewers who claim that you can’t make great beer with malt extract, and you need to go to all grain.

I beg to differ! If you pay as close attention to the extract brewing process as you do for your all-grain brews, you can at least come close with extract, and with less time and equipment. Sometimes you might even make competition-winning beer out of extract. BURP’s Real Ale Competition, as an example, has even awarded Best of Show to an extract-brewed entry.

For me, I’ve always used extract brewing as a way to quickly create a batch of beer when my time was limited. With the competing interests of family and work life, often there just isn’t time to allocate an entire half-day to an all-grain brewing session. This year is a case in point for me: With a cellar full of grain, I find that I’m doing extract brewing for almost all of my brewing so far this year.

Choosing Styles

Some styles are better suited than others for extract brewing. Due to the slight caramelization that takes place normally during the factory’s wort concentration process, very pale beers can be difficult to make with extract. Depending on your choice of extract, you might have trouble with any beer that doesn’t call for at least a touch of caramelization in the flavor.

The easiest styles, in my opinion, for extract brewing are English Bitter and Scottish Ale. These beers call for a touch of caramel, so you don’t have to be picky about your extract or as careful about the handling. American Amber Ale and India Pale Ale are also reasonable candidates.

The hardest styles are pale lagers. I’ve managed good results with Kölsch, but I haven’t tried paler than that, like American Light. It seems that “golden” is about the limit as far as paleness goes, and even then you have to keep OG down at about 1.040 and diligently avoid caramelization. That said, to show what you can do with malt extract, I’ve included a recipe for my Kölsch which has done reasonably well in several competitions. You’ll note that even though I saved time by using extract, it received the same fermentation and lagering process that an all-grain Kölsch would, and that’s part of the “secret”.

Choosing Extracts

My own preference for malt extract is plain, unhopped, dry malt extract. It doesn’t undergo the steady, slow caramelization that age brings upon liquid malt extract. That said, fresh liquid malt extract works fine, but keep it refrigerated if not used immediately. Pre-hopped extracts give the brewer too little control, in my opinion, but there’s a chance you might find one you like, so I won’t discourage you from trying it. Dark extracts can sometimes be a guess as to the dark malt contents, so if you can’t find out details on the actual malts used, consider darkening pale extract with your own selection of dark grains when you want to make a dark beer.

As far as brands go, I once thought Munton & Fison was hands down the best, and I turned up my nose at Briess, but I take all that back now. Some of the currently available Briess extracts produce pretty fine beer. (See recipe below.) There is quite a variety of brands out there with varying and often-unknown content and fermentability. Try a few brands and settle on what you like for each given style.

You now even have the ability to select specific-grain-bill malt extracts as manufacturers widen their offerings and make information more accessible. An example from the Briess website: “Base Malt, Caramel Malt 60L, Munich Malt, Black Malt” and “Fermentability 75%”. Naturally, all-grain still gives you more flexibility, but this is nicely specific information for extract.

The Obvious Methods

For pale beers, choose the palest extract you can find. For amber or dark beers, don’t worry as much. If you’re steeping grains for dark beers, don’t do so in near-boiling water or wort. High temperatures can extract astringent, grainy tannins from the husks, so stay below about 170 F.

Do a full wort boil. That is, if you want 5 gallons of beer, boil 5+ gallons of wort. You’ll need a pot and burner that are sized properly, as well as a wort chiller. Concentrated boils lead to wort darkening, caramelization, and lower hop utilization.

Avoid scorching the syrup by turning off the fire before you start dissolving the extract into boiling water. You’d be surprised how many brewers complain about problems related to this. Don’t fire it up again until everything is dissolved.

The Secret Methods

These are not really secret, but extract brewers often don’t think about these things:

Keep the boil “very tame”, especially for pale beers where you don’t want much caramelization. Remember, the extract has probably been boiled once at the factory. Keep your boil time to an hour or less, just enough get the hop bitterness incorporated in there. The exceptions are dark or amber beers where caramel character is fine, like Scottish Ales, for example. Boil these to your heart’s content – they are well suited to extract brewing!

Low gravity is your friend for pale beers like Kölsch. Keep your OG at the low end of the style range. Higher gravity obviously results in darker wort due to more malt content, but it is also subject to more kettle caramelization and even further darkening during the boil, so the beer can easily end up too dark for the style. This is obviously not a concern for darker beers.

Use yeast nutrient and a massive yeast starter. Modern malt extracts generally have reasonably good levels of yeast nutrients in them, but still not as much as fresh, all-grain wort (from what I have been reading). A bit of added nutrients and a lot of yeast pitched will help avoid the problems caused by weak fermentation.

It’s certainly no secret, but even when brewing with extract, use the same sanitation, wort-chilling, oxygenation, fermentation temperature control, and oxidation-avoidance methods that you normally use for your all-grain batches. Just because you saved some time on the wort-creation process doesn’t mean that you can cut corners on the other processes.

Below is my standard recipe for what I call Flusskrebs Kölsch (Crawfish Kölsch), an extract-only recipe that I brew every spring to bring to a friend’s street party in Ashland, Virginia, for his annual LSU alumni gathering and crawfish boil. I keep meaning to brew all-grain for this party sooner or later, but I get such decent results with malt extract that I haven’t bothered to change anything.

Flusskrebs Kölsch

Recipe for approximately 4.8 gallons.

OG 1041

FG 1013

ABV 3.7%

4.4 SRM (calculated via ProMash)

22 IBUs (calculated via ProMash)

3 lbs Briess Dry Pilsner Malt Extract

1 lb Briess Dry Wheat Malt Extract

0.32 oz Centennial 9.7% AA at 60 min

0.50 oz Spalt 5% AA at 20 min

0.50 oz Spalt 5% AA at 5 min

Whirlfloc tablet at 20 min

Wyeast yeast nutrient (1/2 tsp) at 5 min

1.5 liter yeast starter, WLP029 Kölsch

60 minute modest boil, then chill to 62 F.

Primary fermentation 9 days at 63 F, rack to secondary.

Secondary 7-14 days at 38-45 F, rack to serving keg.

2-3 months of long-term lagering at 38-40 F before serving.