Steeping vs buying LME/DME?

I'm about to start my second Coopers Stout and looking for the best taste/abv/cost tweak.
Many posts suggest adding '1.5kg Coopers Extra Dark LME' but this comes in at £9.50 which is almost the sane price as the kit!
Can anyone tell me of a cheaper way to produce a suitable alternative malt addition from grain? Can this be combined with kit brewing?
I feel like an interloper asking this as I'm far from ready to leap over to the Darkside (one day, I can feel it calling..:twisted:) but maybe I can start here? Can kit brewers produce the necessary from, say, http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Chocolate_Malt_500g_Crushed_Milled.html#.VHuvlGfX_Fw

Perhaps a partial mash/mini mash plus the kit? To be honest I don't know a lot about partial mashes/mini mashes as I've never done one and have only ever done a full BIAB full mash - Google is you friend ;-).

You probably will prefer to go with a pale malt rather than chocolate unless of course your doing a dark beer like stout or porter

Yes you can do a mini mash, and your beer will be better for it, and it will be much cheaper. You will need mostly pale malt, but also some roasted malt, as dark extract contains both these grains.

1kg of Pale Malt plus 200g of roasted barley (total cost about £2) would enable you to hit an OG of about 1040 with the Coopers kit if you brewed short to 20 litres instead of 23 litres. Based on 75% efficiency, which is the percentage of the potential sugars you get from the grains. You could use more pale malt to increase the strength. 1.5kg would take you to about 1046, 2kg to about 1052.

All you have to do is soak or m'mash' the grains in about 3 litres of water per kg, at a temp between 63 and 69C, for one hour normally. Use a thermometer, put the lid on and wrap a towel round it. Then strain and rinse with more hot water and boil the wort to kill all known life-forms.

I have tried all sorts of ways of making beer cheaply, and I now use this method to make 10 litre all grain brews - great beer, cheap and easy. No fancy equipment required. Just a 15 litre pan, £16 from Wilkos, and a bag, which I made from muslin, to hold the grains and make straining easier. 10 litres gives me 20 x 500ml bottles, or 30 x 330 ml, which I use for stronger brews.

For 10 litres I use about 2 to 2.5kg grain which costs £1.60 per kg, 20 - 80g hops which mostly cost £2.25 per 100g from Worcester Hop Shop, and I re-use yeast several times. Fantastic beer for very little cost. And I've learnt loads about beer ingredients and brewing technique. But basically you soak grains, rinse, boil with hops, cool, pitch yeast. Any mug can do it.

clibit said:

All you have to do is soak or m'mash' the grains in about 3 litres of water per kg, at a temp between 63 and 69C, for one hour normally. Use a thermometer, put the lid on and wrap a towel round it. Then strain and rinse with more hot water and boil the wort to kill all known life-forms.

I have tried all sorts of ways of making beer cheaply, and I now use this method to make 10 litre all grain brews - great beer, cheap and easy. No fancy equipment required. Just a 15 litre pan, £16 from Wilkos, and a bag, which I made from muslin, to hold the grains and make straining easier. 10 litres gives me 20 x 500ml bottles, or 30 x 330 ml, which I use for stronger brews.

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So basically your doing BIAB. I regularly do 5 and 10 litre batches. Don't get 20 bottles from the 10L though as I lose a couple of litres to trub

For the likes of the chocolate malt, you could take a look at cold steeping it:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=331-Mq-G5Xk[/ame]

I've never tried this so can't comment either way but it caught my eye and bookmarked for future use (also resisting the Darkside calling... for now :shock:)

Oh, and if you do try it, please post all the details :-D

baggybill said:

For the likes of the chocolate malt, you could take a look at cold steeping it:

I've never tried this so can't comment either way but it caught my eye and bookmarked for future use (also resisting the Darkside calling... for now :shock:)

Oh, and if you do try it, please post all the details :-D

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RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!!! :twisted::twisted::twisted:

Nice one bill. Almost make me want to go back to kit brewing - speed of a kit brewing with the cheapness of AG (well, drastically reducing the cost as a kg of DME costs a tenner)

Good option if I get low on stocks and need to geta couple of brews in quickly and cheaply

Thanks lads, some very useful info here, but the star answer is from clibit, brilliant stuff :hat:
" I now use this method to make 10 litre all grain brews"
clibit, if you check back here could you possibly supply a recipe? You make it sound so simple and I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd love to have a bash..

I'm left with a couple of questions though..
Is Amber Malt a viable substitute for Pale Malt, or are they very different? Amber seems plentiful whereas I've not yet seen Pale Malt listed.
Should I buy cracked or whole grains?
Using the 'warm mini mash' method (63-69 degrees C) is there a calculation for the amount of grain needed (approximately) for an equivalent amount of extract, e.g. using, say, 3.5kg will yield the same amount of malt as 'X' amount of DME/LME?
So that I can work out how much to add to a kit..
Grateful for any follow-up.

BruinTuns said:

Thanks lads, some very useful info here, but the star answer is from clibit, brilliant stuff :hat:
" I now use this method to make 10 litre all grain brews"
clibit, if you check back here could you possibly supply a recipe? You make it sound so simple and I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd love to have a bash..

I'm left with a couple of questions though..
Is Amber Malt a viable substitute for Pale Malt, or are they very different? Amber seems plentiful whereas I've not yet seen Pale Malt listed.
Should I buy cracked or whole grains?
Using the 'warm mini mash' method (63-69 degrees C) is there a calculation for the amount of grain needed (approximately) for an equivalent amount of extract, e.g. using, say, 3.5kg will yield the same amount of malt as 'X' amount of DME/LME?
So that I can work out how much to add to a kit..
Grateful for any follow-up.

Click to expand...

Pale malt is another generic name for base malt. The base malts are -Maris Otter,Vienna, Munich, Mild as are six row and two row but your much less likely to come across those two as there American base malts. Amber malt is a specialty malt so you couldn't substitute Amber for say Marris Otter

Unless you've got a grain mill you need to buy cracked grains although you can just do small amounts with a rolling pin in a zip lock bag

Thanks MyQul. I keep coming across 'Crystal Malt' (in varying shades, dark, light etc) is this a contender? Only ask because I can't find the recommended products..
Is there anything here: http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Coloured_Malts.html
that I should be looking at?
Or here: http://www.home-brew-online.com/ingredients-c45/beer-making-c181#:page2
?

I luuurve crystal. Again it's a specialty malt used for colour (especially english pale ales) as well as taste it imparts sweet caramel flavour and if used too much can be a bit cloying (but I've got a sweet tooth, which is why i like it so much), The lighter the crystal the more sugars/sweetness it imparts to t beer (I think).

The best way to do this is to post which kit you want to add some steeped malts to and people will suggest which malt to add based on the style of beer the kit is.

Initially Coopers Stout and John Bull IPA. In both cases the object is to add flavour (and possibly body in the case of the IPA), up the abv slightly and to achieve these ends more economically that buying DME?LME

BruinTuns said:

Thanks lads, some very useful info here, but the star answer is from clibit, brilliant stuff :hat:
" I now use this method to make 10 litre all grain brews"
clibit, if you check back here could you possibly supply a recipe? You make it sound so simple and I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd love to have a bash..

I'm left with a couple of questions though..
Is Amber Malt a viable substitute for Pale Malt, or are they very different? Amber seems plentiful whereas I've not yet seen Pale Malt listed.
Should I buy cracked or whole grains?
Using the 'warm mini mash' method (63-69 degrees C) is there a calculation for the amount of grain needed (approximately) for an equivalent amount of extract, e.g. using, say, 3.5kg will yield the same amount of malt as 'X' amount of DME/LME?
So that I can work out how much to add to a kit..
Grateful for any follow-up.

Click to expand...

Amber malt is a specialty malt, and is an addition to base malt, not a replacement. As is crystal. And Chocolate, Black malt, brown malt, roast barley etc. Generally speaking, you use about 5% of the total grain for each of these malts. Recipes vary though. Pale ales often use about 5% crystal, Brown ales and milds about 5% crystal plus 3-5% chocolate, stouts use maybe 5% roast barley and/or black malt.

Everywhere sells base/pale malt. Maris Otter is the most common and is highly regarded. Six row is American. All English malts are two row. America has both 6 and 2 row. But all you need to do is get a pale malt - such as Maris Otter, Pearl, Halcyon, Golden Promise. Or lager malt, which is lighter but can also be used as a base malt for ales.

I use free software called Brewmate to calculate quantities. It is easy to use. You put in the ingredients and quantities etc and you can then adjust the batch size and it recalculates. Or you can find recipes on the net and adjust the quantities. Most American recipes are given in 19 litre quantities, so you could halve them for 9.5 litres. But download Brewmate, it will teach you loads. And it stores recipes you enter.

I could give you a recipe but I don't know what you like and I spend time browsing sites for them. I enter the quantities given and then adjust the batch size to whatever I want. This site has a recipe section at the top of this page. You can use all grain, partial mash or extract recipes. I do some partial mashes but mainly all grain, cheaper and the best.

I worked out the quantities I gave above to add to your kit using Brewmate, in a less than a minute. I added the kit as 1.7L liquid malt extract, then added amounts of pale malt to see what OG it would come to. But here's a simple conversion chart.

http://www.jaysbrewing.com/2011/11/17/lazy-chart-for-converting-dme-lme-grain/

I found the following site really useful for my brewing method and also some good tried and tested recipes:

http://beerandwinejournal.com/category/beer/homebrewing/

I've just done the Supercell Stout (with different hops) and it's fantastic. Miles better than a kit. The best stout I've ever tasted in fact. It takes longer than a kit, but I can do this type of brew in about 2.5 hours. I have a coolbox mashtun and used to make 5 gallon brews but rarely use it now, cos it takes all day. I can do stove top brews in the pot in an evening. I do lose some to trub, but not 2 litres. Usually one litre ish, it depends on the yeast and whether I dry hop. With the stout it was 0.5 litre loss. I can crash chill it in the FV in the fridge, cos my 10L FV is small, so it clears well and packs down.

I have a basic grinder that cost £25 but I sometimes buy crushed malt. Using ready crushed just speeds things up, but whole malt keeps longer.

clibit, that's one of the most helpful and thorough answers I've seen on the forum. I now understand enough to start to make sense of recipes and articles and to plan my own first partial. Many thanks.
And for anyone else checking in here I found this useful link in another thread: http://www.howtobrew.com/section2/chapter12.html

Do it! It's great fun, very satisfying, and gives great results. Partial mashes are a really good way to go in my opinion. You can make quality beer very quickly and easily. You can vary the proportion of extract to grain. If you are below target OG, just add some dried extract. If over target OG, add water, to a certain extent.

And do download Brewmate from brewmate.net, it's only a small file, and you will gradually learn a lot about beer recipe construction and things like bitterness, OG and FG, gravity to bitterness ratio, colour, yeast attenuation etc.

If you add a mash to a kit, boil the wort and add hops near or at the end of the boil, as the kit already contains bittering hops. You can obviously add more bitterness if you want, but the beer will be improved by adding flavour and aroma hops, and dry hopping is always an option. Add your kit can to the FV in the usual way, add your boiled wort to it, and top up with cold water. Take a hydrometer reading and pitch yeast when the temp is down to about 20*C.

You can change any kit completely by adding malt and/or hops, or by using a different yeast. For example, add roast barley to the mash and making a porter/stout from all sorts of kit. By studying recipes you will suss out how different beers are constructed and learn how to build them to your own tastes, learning what different grains, hops and yeasts taste like. If you drop kits altogether and use plain extract, or do all grain, you are in complete control of the recipe and know exactly what is going on.

Can you tell I'm hooked? :razz: :drink:

BruinTuns said:

Initially Coopers Stout and John Bull IPA. In both cases the object is to add flavour (and possibly body in the case of the IPA), up the abv slightly and to achieve these ends more economically that buying DME?LME

Click to expand...

Clibit has given you a super comprehensive answer to what to add to kits.

The Stout you could add some chocolate to it. If you wanted some more roasty flavours too add a samll teeny bit of roasted barley too

The IPA any base malt - google them to find out what attributes they bring to a beer but Marris Otter will be fine

clibit said:

.I do lose some to trub, but not 2 litres. Usually one litre ish, it depends on the yeast and whether I dry hop. With the stout it was 0.5 litre loss. I can crash chill it in the FV in the fridge, cos my 10L FV is small, so it clears well and packs down.

Click to expand...

The 2L loss is almost definately do to break material robbing me of FV space. Do you whirlpool as I understand this will leave a lot of the break material in the pot. I don't whirlpool just chuck everything in the FV passing first through a sieve and paint strainer. Gonna have a goat whirlpooling this weekend

BruinTuns said:

Initially Coopers Stout and John Bull IPA. In both cases the object is to add flavour (and possibly body in the case of the IPA), up the abv slightly and to achieve these ends more economically that buying DME?LME

Click to expand...

Personally I don't like the Coppers Stout but I'm just very fussy about my stouts, like one might be fussy about speakers. I did find it difficult to use a dark LME with the Coopers Stout kit, re attenuation and the end result was too sweet for my dry stout preferenced taste.
As regards to the IPA, why not just brew the basic recipe first? with one simple but wonderful add on, put in 30-50 gr of fuggles hops after fermentation has finished and leave for 5 or days. When you have established this base, then you can follow the well expressed advice here.

MyQul said:

The 2L loss is almost definately do to break material robbing me of FV space. Do you whirlpool as I understand this will leave a lot of the break material in the pot. I don't whirlpool just chuck everything in the FV passing first through a sieve and paint strainer. Gonna have a goat whirlpooling this weekend

Click to expand...

No I don't whirlpool, I just cold crash in the fridge for 1 to 3 days and then syphon to a bottling bucket. I syphon right down to the sediment and if I get any sediment across into the bottling bucket I allow to settle for a while again. So I only lose the sediment amount and a tiny bit more.

clibit said:

No I don't whirlpool, I just cold crash in the fridge for 1 to 3 days and then syphon to a bottling bucket. I syphon right down to the sediment and if I get any sediment across into the bottling bucket I allow to settle for a while again. So I only lose the sediment amount and a tiny bit more.

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So I guess the cold crashing (never done it my self) will 'pull' out the break material from your wort before transfering to the BB?

Yes cold crashing speeds up the settling out of all the yeast and break material. It will happen at room temperature over a longer period of time, but I find that cold crashing does a much better job in a much shorter time.