Intermediate

Once you have one or two extract kit brews under your belt, you may want to progress to the intermediate brewing process. This involves steeping ½ to 2 or 3 pounds of crushed specialty grains in your brewing water prior to adding the extract. With specialty grains, you can now use light malt extract as the base malt and use the grains to provide the color, flavors and possibly some caramelized sugars to add depth and complexity to the resulting beer. The process is explained in Chapter 13: Steeping Specialty Grains of John Palmer's book, How To Brew.

One of the best things that a new brewer can do to get a feel for using grain is to steep specialty grains in hot water and use this wort for an extract-based recipe. Using specialty grain allows the brewer to increase the complexity of the wort as compared to what’s usually available from plain extract.

Historically, brewers had to settle for light, amber, or dark extract, so steeping specialty grain was practically a necessity. Nowadays, there is a lot more variety in brewing kits, and many extract producers make top-quality kits for particular styles that incorporate several malts and real individuality. But if a brewer wants to create his own recipe, then steeping specialty grain offers more flexibility.

Almost every beer style can be made by using pale malt extract and steeping specialty grains; brown ale, bitter, India pale ale, stout, weizen, and Pilsener can all be made using this method. And the resulting beer flavor will be superior to what can be made using extracts alone. Award-winning beers can be made solely from extract, but freshness of the extract can be an issue, and using grain can make the difference between a good beer and an outstanding one.

Often the extract kit you buy may be more than a year old, and the resulting beer may have a dull, soapy character due to oxidation. Stay away from dusty cans! Look for a brand that the shop sells a lot of, so that the extract is always fresh. Shops that sell their own extract kits will often go through a 55-gallon drum of extract every couple of weeks. Dry malt extract has a much longer shelf life (years), so look for dry if you aren’t sure of the liquid. Creating some new wort by steeping crushed grain adds back some of the fresh malt character that is often missing from purely extract recipes.

And it’s fun to experiment, right?

The Grain

There are basically two kinds of malts: those that need to be mashed, and those that don’t. Mashing is the hot water soaking process that provides the right conditions for the enzymes to convert the grain starches into fermentable sugars. Specialty malts like caramel and roasted malts do not need to be mashed. Caramel malts have their starches converted to sugars by heat right inside the hull. These malts contain some unfermentable sugars, leaving a pleasant, caramellike sweetness. Caramel malts are available in different Lovibond ratings (color), each having a different degree of fermentability and characteristic sweetness. Roasted malts have had their sugars charred by roasting at high temperatures, giving them a deep red/brown or black color and bittersweet, dark chocolate, or coffeelike flavors.

Mechanics of Steeping

To use the caramel and roasted specialty malts, the grain must be crushed to expose the sugars to the water. While the grain is soaking, the hot water is leaching the sugars out of the grain and dissolving them into the wort. The factors that influence how well the sugars are extracted are the steeping time, temperature, and particle size. Obviously, the more finely you crush the malt, the more completely you can extract the sugars. However, most supply shops have their mills adjusted for mashing and lautering purposes, and if the particle size were much smaller, it would be difficult to contain within the grain bag.

Steeping specialty grain is like making tea. The crushed grain is soaked in hot water (150 to 170° F, 66 to 77° C) for 30 minutes. Even though a color change will be noticeable early on, steep for the entire 30 minutes to get as much of the available sugar dissolved into the wort as possible. The grain is removed from the water, and that water (now a wort) is then used to dissolve the extract for the boil.

The one sticky part is the phrase, “The grain is removed from the water…” How? Well, the best way is to buy a grain bag. These bags are made of nylon or muslin and have a drawstring closure. They will hold about a pound of crushed specialty grain, making in essence a giant teabag. Many homebrew supply shops have prepackaged specialty grains in 0.5 to 1-pound amounts for just this purpose. Don’t try to put all of the grain into one bag; use two or more bags if necessary. If you put too much in, the grain will swell and compact, and the extraction will decrease.

The analogy to a teabag is a good one, in that if the grain is steeped too long (hours), astringent tannin compounds (a.k.a. polyphenols) can be extracted from the grain husks. The compounds give the wort a dry, puckering taste, just like a black teabag that has been steeped too long. The extraction of tannins is especially prevalent if the water is too hot (above 170° F [77° C]). Previous practices for steeping specialty grains had the brewer putting the grain in the pot and bringing it to a boil before removal. That method often resulted in tannin extraction.

Water chemistry also plays a role in tannin extraction. Steeping the heavily roasted malts in low alkalinity water (i.e., low bicarbonate levels) will produce conditions that are too acidic, and harsh flavors will result. Likewise, steeping the lightest crystal malts in highly alkaline water could produce conditions that are too alkaline, and tannin extraction would be a problem again. For best results, the ratio of steeping water to grain should be less than one gallon per pound.

Steeping differs from mashing in that there is no enzyme activity taking place to convert grain or adjunct starches to sugars. If grain with enzyme diastatic potential is steeped, that’s a mash. You can “steep” the enzymatic malts, but if you don’t steep them under the right conditions, you won’t get good conversion of the sugars [see section 3 of How To Brew for more on steeping enzymatic malts]. Meanwhile, let’s use steeping to make a batch of porter.

Typical Malt Steeping Yields in Points/Pound/Gallon

Malt Type	PPG Steep
Two-row base malt	-
Six-row base malt	-
Two-row British pale malt	-
Amber malt	-
Vienna malt	-
Munich malt	-
Brown malt	8
CaraPils malt	8*
Light crystal (10-15 ºL)	14
Pale crystal (25-40 ºL)	22
Medium crystal (60-75 ºL)	18
Dark crystal (120 ºL)	16
Special “B”	16
Chocolate malt	15
Roasted barley	21
Black malt	21
Wheat malt	-
Rye malt	-

Steeping data is experimental and was obtained by steeping 1 pound in 1 gallon at 160° F (71° C) for 30 minutes. All malts were crushed in a two-roller mill at the same setting. Your results may differ.

* Difficult to crush

Example Batch

As an example, I will describe the steeping procedure using a porter recipe (one of my favorite styles). A porter is an ale with a dark color, very malty flavor, and a bit of a roasted finish. A porter differs from a brown ale by being more assertive, darker, and more full bodied, but with less of a roasted malt flavor than a stout.

Port O’ Palmer Porter

Malts	Gravity Points
6.6 lbs. (3kg) pale malt extract (liquid)	40
0.5 lb. (227g) crystal 60 ºL malt	3
0.5 lb. (227kg) chocolate malt	3
0.25 lb. (113g) black patent malt	1
Boil gravity for 3 Gallons	1.047 (13.3 °P)
OG for 5 Gallons	1.054 (11.7 °P

 

Hops	Boil Time	IBUs
0.5 oz. (14g) Horizon (12%)	60	21
0.75 oz. (21g) Willamette (5%)	40	12
0.5 oz. (14g) Willamette (5%)	20	5
Total IBUs		38

 

Yeast	Fermentation Schedule
London Ale (liquid)	Primary fermentation at 65° F (18° C) for 2 weeks

 

Procedure

The only change from your regular extract brewing procedure is that you will be steeping the grain in the brewpot before you add the malt extract. For best flavor results, the ratio of steeping water to grain should be less than 1 gallon per pound.

1. Heat 1 gallon of water in the brewpot until it reaches 160° F ± 10°.
2. Immerse the grain bag in the pot for 30 minutes. The grain bag may be dunked and swirled like a teabag during this time to make sure that all of the grain is wetted.  Moving it around will help to improve the yield, but don’t splash. Maintaining the temperature during the steep is not vital.
3. After 30 minutes, remove the grain bag from the pot, and let it drain to avoid dripping on the stove.
4. Now you have a preliminary wort to which the malt extract is added. Stir in one can (3.3 lbs., 1.5kg) of pale malt extract. Add more water to the pot to bring the wort volume up to 3 gallons (11.4 liters).
5. Bring the wort to a boil, and add hop additions as listed in the recipe.
6. When the wort is finished boiling, add the remaining can of pale malt extract to the brewpot. Stir it in to make sure it is fully dissolved. After 10 minutes total time has elapsed, the additional extract is pasteurized, and you can proceed to cooling the wort, pouring it into the fermenter, pitching the yeast, etc.