Ingredients/No Recipe

[sihole]

OK! My buddy and I are in South Korea, flying by the seat our pants! Our first batch gets bottled tonight. Tomorrow we brew. BUT! We don't have a recipe. What we do have is: 3 pounds dry extract, 1 pound caramalt, 1 oz cluster, 1 oz amarillo, 1 oz Pride of Ringwood, safale s-04. Planning to simply do rolling pin in a zip lock on the caramalt, not sure what amount of water to boil...

Suggestions?

Concerns?

Can you tell we're NEW?

 

[TheMumbler]

I haven't done any extract brewing and don't know the hops. There is a walkthrough for a stout here which will probably help. S04 is an ale yeast so I think lagers are out.

I'm pretty sure you don't want to use all that caramalt though. Maybe a quarter of it? Don't crush the caramalt you aren't using. I would steep it in the same way that the black and chocolate malts are in that walkthrough.

There are a couple of extract recipes in the recipes section (one of the buttons at the top left) and looking at those I would guess that you want to aim for around 12l final volume. The recipes I looked at are numbers 60 and 61. That means that you should start with more water (10% is my usual rule of thumb) to allow for evaporation. At a guess I would boil for 60 mins and add half the cluster at the start of the boil and half 15 mins from the end. However that is a real stab in the dark based on a quick look on t'interweb. Without knowing the alpha acid values of the hops it is very hard to know how much you should use and when.

It would be helpful if you let us know how big the pot you are going to boil in is, the alpha acid (aa) of the hops and some kind of clue as to the type of beer you are after. I think you can boil with less water and top up with extract beers if you don't have a big enough pot, but it isn't best practice.

As I said I haven't done a brew from extract so you may be better off trying to find the info elsewhere. Hopefully somebody more knowledgeable will be along soon :)

Best of luck

 

[jonewer]

With only 3lbs of dry extract, I wouldnt do much more than a 10 litre brew.... probably about 100g of caramalt steeped in a sock in a pot of hot water for half an hour, then drain the liqour into your wort.....

I dont know those hop varieties other than the amarillos which are very citrusy and I know that PoR are quite high alpha. I would boil up the PoR for the length of the boil then add amarillos at about 20mins left to boil and I'm not sure about the cluster hops at all :wha: