2

SIMPLE EXTRACT BREWING

“It is a poor workman that blames his tools.”

—Anonymous

Historically, the traditional trajectory of a homebrewer’s craft started with making beer from sticky malt extract powders and syrups. Maybe it was an old can of something sitting on a dusty shelf, with instructions like, “Dissolve one can and x pounds of sugar in hot water and bring to a boil. Cool. Pour into a crock. Pitch the included yeast, cover with cheese cloth …”

You know what? How about we show you some genuine instructions from a Prohibition-era can of Blue Ribbon Malt Extract? It’s a piece of history and an efficient brewer’s dream. Double win!

And then we get the best part of the instructions. Well after variants on making “Kentucky Mountain Dew” and “Cider,” there’s this warning:

Mmmm … healthful non-alcoholic, hop-flavored drink, just like your granddad used to make.

MODERN HOMEBREWING PIONEERS

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

—H.L. Mencken

Over time, extract instructions got better. Cheesecloth, crocks, and Prohibition warnings went by the wayside. Fresh yeast cakes got replaced with dried yeast, for better or worse. Instructions now include steps about chilling, sanitizing, and, hey, how about adding some fresh ingredients like grain and hops to liven things up!

But you know what, those old instructions for Blue Ribbon Malt up above, they were good enough for some of our heroes, like the good doctor himself, Hunter S. Thompson. Beer lovers know the dean of gonzo journalism for the pithy slogan, “Good people drink good beer.” But in a retrospective of his photography, there is a shot of a lone carboy perched on a table, lit by a bare bulb with a blowoff hose curling around in a graceful arc to a round flask with settled yeast.1 Thompson almost certainly made that batch of beer from extract. He also brewed while living in Big Sur, California during the early 1960s, writing a friend that he was surrounded by “vats of homemade beer in the closet,” among other things.2

One of our other favorite authors, the perpetually cynical and acerbic H.L. Mencken, was a brewer as well. When he wasn’t writing columns for the Baltimore Sun, Mencken was an astute student of brewing. During the height of Prohibition he taught homebrewing classes and exchanged beers with friends. He took extensive brewing notes, was not above experimenting, and acquired yeasts straight from Munich for his helles and lagers.3 Where others followed those instructions about extra sugar, Mencken was a malt-driven man, adding more extract to his brews while claiming it was the only way to get a respectable beer. Seriously, this man would fit right alongside any of us. Well, except Drew, because he apparently hates people adding strange things to the brew kettle.

Extract was good enough for these towering maestros of American letters. So, we need to figure out why extract has never quite received the respect we think it deserves. Too many look at extract as if it’s training-wheels brewing, not worthy of the title “brewing” or capable of making a worthy product.

THE BASICS ABOUT BREWING AND EXTRACT

Ok, let’s talk a little about extract. What is it? How is it made? And why should we all respect the technical magnificence of the stuff? To start with, you have to understand brewing, because without brewing you don’t have extract.

To make beer or wine, you ferment sugars from fruit (wine) or grain (beer). With fruit, the sugars are easily accessible, just crush the fruit and you’re good to go. With grain, though, it’s a little more difficult. You need to go through a process of converting the starch in the grain into sugars that you can ferment. As well as barley, grains commonly used in brewing beer include wheat, rice, corn, oats, rye, and even more exotic grains like quinoa and triticale. However, barley became the brewer’s grain of choice for a number of reasons:

So how do we get from grain to extract? Well, the first step is malting. A maltster converts barley (or other grain) into malt by wetting it and letting it sprout in a very controlled process, which activates the grain’s enzymes. Brewers use those enzymes to convert the grain’s starches to fermentable sugars.

To stop the sprouting process, the maltster kilns (dries) the malt. Kilning at different temperatures, moisture levels, and times produces different colors and flavors of malt. Very lightly kilned malts make beers like pale ale or Pilsner. Heavily kilned or roasted malts provide the deep black appearance and coffee flavors in porters and stouts. By using various colors and types of grain, you can produce all the colors and flavors of beer.

Brewers take the finished malt and mash it. Mashing is nothing more than soaking the crushed grain in hot water. This reactivates those malt enzymes that convert the grain’s starches into sugars. Keep in mind that the darker the malt, the fewer enzymes will be left after the malting process. You need some lighter grains in there to convert the starches in the darker malts (see chapter 4). But don’t fret too much—almost all beer recipes start with a base of enzymatically strong pale malts. You won’t need to worry too much until you decide to do something outrageous.

To make malt extract, the mashing is done at the processing facility for you. The liquid from the mash, called wort, (pronounced “wert”) is separated from the now used-up grain. That liquid is boiled for a while, then concentrated under a vacuum at below boiling temperatures to make liquid malt extract (LME), a sweet, sticky, thick syrup. In order to make dry malt extract (DME), the LME is sent to a spray dryer. Nozzles at the top of the dryer create small LME particulates as it is sprayed into the dryer, where the hot air inside dries them out.

It’s tempting from our vantage point as homebrewers to think of extract as an inferior product marketed to people who just want to make something cold and wet. The reality is that beer production, whether commercial or homebrewing, is far from the most common use of malt extract. Later on in this chapter we’ll talk about the real reason maltsters make their extract products. We’re just lucky they’re available to us!

RESCUING EXTRACT FROM ITS REPUTATION

Here’s a common misperception: we all think—no, we all know—that extract beer sucks. Or is it that extract brewers suck?

Let’s take a step back to our childhoods for a moment. At some point, by virtue of being new to the world, we tried something we never tried before. Did we excel at it? Both of us will admit that no, we sucked.

Drew’s first solo culinary creations, well, they were interesting. It took years of practice to get to the point of effortlessly whipping out some damn fine dinners. In the meantime, Drew also left innumerable attempts strewn behind him to get better at the drums or guitar, or talking like a regular human being. Maybe one of these days he’ll even finish his murder mystery or his children’s story, Toby and the Secret Squirrel Army.

Denny’s first attempts at both cooking and beer went better. His first culinary attempt was a chocolate soufflé that he’d seen Julia Child make on TV when he was 12 years old. Denny found a recipe in one of his mother’s cookbooks and produced it one evening when his grandparents came over for dinner. His recollection is that it came out perfectly, but there’s a lot of memory fog in the days between then and now.

Denny lucked out with his first batch of beer too. It was an American pale ale, with crystal malt as a steeping grain, Cascade hop pellets, and liquid malt extract. It would be interesting to taste that beer today and see if it was as good as Denny remembers, or if the memory fog just makes it seem like it. In between that beer and today, there were some failed beers as he learned what mattered and what didn’t.

The point is that we both likely sucked at brewing when we first started. Don’t get us wrong, we enjoyed the hell out of what we made (except Drew’s second attempt, which was a chlorophenolic batch that was an offense to the brewing gods.) But we’re fairly certain those around us nodded politely, sipped their beer, and waited patiently hoping that we’d get better. We’d like to think we have. There’s nothing like gleaning experience from mistakes when it comes to learning!

Why Extract Is Awesome

Why Extract Is Terrible

THE SIMPLEST BREW DAY EVER

The malthouse took care of the hard, sweaty mash for you. Your job as a brewer is to finish their work! On brew day, you’ll be responsible for dissolving the extract, adding fresh grain character, boiling the results, cooling it, and starting the fermentation. In other words, you’ve got plenty of work to do, so we’re going to set you up with our simple guide!

If you buy a kit of ingredients there will also be instructions that come with it. And there are a ton of really great books out there with instructions about how to get started brewing. We highly recommend The Everything Homebrewing Book by Drew, Experimental Homebrewing and Homebrew All-Stars by the two of us, or How to Brew (hey, the title says it all!) by our good friend, John Palmer.4

The Oversimplified Explanation of Extract Brewing

Brewing an extract beer will take about four to five hours, but you’ll only be actively busy for a couple of those. Spend the downtime cleaning your house or reading one of our other books!

For your first brew, you’ll probably want to purchase a complete kit of ingredients, either online or from a local homebrew supply shop. If you don’t already have a five-gallon pot and a fermenting bucket, the homebrew supply shop can help you with those parts too! (Also, you’ll want a few cases of beer bottles and fresh caps to use.) Other equipment you’ll need is a long spoon, a thermometer, and, likely, a strainer. We’re trying to keep it simple, so for now just buy the ingredients for a style of beer you like. Once you get a handle on the flavors and interactions between ingredients, you can try one of the recipes we’ve included in this book or create your own. (By the way, we assume in these instructions, and for a good portion of the book, that we’re dealing with the standard homebrewer 5 gal. [~19 L] batch, but these processes all work whether you’re making one gallon or 300. OK, maybe not 300, but really, almost.)

The Bare Minimum Equipment

Give yourself a break and don’t go for an extra strong style of beer or a lager—they take extra time and effort to make. Keep it simple and learn the basics. A pale ale, bitter, saison, or porter are good styles to start with because they don’t require extra steps and can be brewed and fermented in a couple of weeks.

Make sure to read through the whole process and recipe before you start! Treat it like you’re cooking a new recipe or assembling a piece of furniture that came with little wrenches. It’ll get frustrating if you don’t.

MAKE THE WORT.

The first step is making your wort. Heat up about two gallons of water to just below boiling. You’re looking for the stage when bubbles are starting to form or if you have a reliable thermometer, 170°F. If your kit came with “steeping grains,” put those in the pot before starting the steeping. Make sure the grain is crushed! To make your life easier, put the grain in a muslin or nylon grain bag, which you can get from a homebrew store. You can even use a paint strainer bag from the hardware store. When the water temperature is about 170°F, remove the steeping grains, take the pot off the heat, and stir in your malt extract. When you add the extract to the water, you make wort. You’re fancy now!

BOIL THE WORT.

The second step is to boil the wort you just made. You bring the wort to a boil to kill any nasty bacteria that could spoil your beer. Add the hops according the recipe directions that you are following. A bit of an oddity about hop timing is how it’s recorded in a recipe. When you see a recipe say, “1.0 oz. Cascade at 15 minutes,” it means you want to boil the Cascade hops for 15 minutes. If your total boil is 60 minutes, then you boil for 45 minutes and then add that dose of Cascade with 15 minutes left to go (also see the Reading a Recipe box). Then move on to finish the beer.

The boil also helps extract bittering and aromatic components from the hops you add. How much of these hop components that go into your beer is the degree of hop utilization. Without hops, beer is just sugar water! Killing off the bacteria in the wort is a good thing, but if you don’t cool it down before you put your yeast in, the same heat that killed the bacteria can kill your yeast.

CHILL THE WORT.

Chilling the wort has two goals: (1) to quickly cool the wort below the bacterial contamination zone of 90–140°F (32–60°C), and (2) to get the wort into the preferred ale yeast fermentation range of 60–70°F (15.5–21°C). Chill the wort in the kettle to the fermentation temperature range before transferring it to your fermentor and adding your yeast. Don’t forget to top up the fermentor to 5 gal. (19 L) with an additional 3–3.5 gal. (11.4–13.3 L) of cold, filtered water. (Boiled and chilled in the fridge is best; chilled means it can help pull your wort down into proper fermentation range quickly.)

FERMENT THE WORT, A.K.A MAKE BEER!

Fermenting the wort is where the magic happens! Put your yeast in (that’s called pitching) and stand back and wait. OK, you don’t need to stand back, it’s not going to explode. After pitching your yeast it will take a few days for the magic to happen, so go find a comfy place to sit (although we do recommend watching what happens—it’s kinda fascinating). Close up the fermentor once the yeast is in there. Use an airlock to keep dust and foulness out of the beer. Put the fermentor somewhere cool at 60–70°F (15.5–21°C)—a closet, a water bath, your bath tub, etc.—and go to sleep. You deserve a nap!

What to Expect When You’re Expecting Beer

The full conversion from wort to beer can take from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the style of beer you make. In general, a week or two is enough. The old saying goes, “Brewers make wort, yeast makes beer.” Fermentation is where the little critters do their job! The yeast cells start reproducing, eating that sugar, and giving off alcohol as a by-product of fermentation. Yeast party!

KNOWING WHEN FERMENTATION IS OVER.

How do you know when the yeast is done fermenting? There are two ways. The simple way is to observe the beer. Is it still bubbling? Is there a head of foam (kräusen in the brewing world) on top of it? If the answer to both of those is no, then it’s a good bet that the yeast is done.

But the simple way won’t tell you for certain. That’s what the hydrometer in your brewing gear is for. A hydrometer is used to measure the specific gravity of the beer. Specific gravity is the ratio of the wort’s density to the density of pure water (pure water is set at 1.000). Sugar dissolved into water makes that water denser. Measuring the specific gravity tells you how much sugar has made it into your wort. Your recipe or recipe kit will tell you what the specific gravity of your wort should be before you start fermenting it. This is called original gravity, abbreviated as OG. After fermentation, there will be less sugar and you’ll get a lower reading. This is your beer’s final gravity, or FG. Your kit might list what the FG should be. Hit that number and you know the beer is done. If the recipe doesn’t tell you what the FG should be, a good guess is that it should end up at about 20%–25% of what the OG was. For example, if your OG was 1.050, then a good FG would be around 1.010.

By the way, don’t panic if you didn’t hit your numbers precisely. Let the beer tell you when it’s done. If the beer is at 1.015 and is still at 1.015 a few days later, then your yeast is finished working. Proceed to packaging!

PACKAGE THE BEER, A.K.A. BOTTLE OR AND KEG IT.

For most new homebrewers, packaging means putting the beer in a bottle, adding a bit of sugar that will ferment and produce carbonation (this is called priming the beer), and sealing with a bottle cap. Sealing allows carbon dioxide (CO2) to build up in the bottles and go into solution in the beer, carbonating it. Alternatively, a lot of brewers put their beer into a 5 gal. soda keg and inject CO2 from a tank, but that might a bit beyond where you’re at now.

DRINK THE BEER!

Drinking the beer is what you’ve been waiting for! After a week or two of letting your bottles sit at room temperature to carbonate, it’s time to chill some down in the fridge and pour yourself a glass of your own handmade, homemade beer. Please, no frosted glasses right from the freezer! The colder your beer is, the less you can taste. You spent your time and effort on this beer, so you deserve to enjoy it at its finest. (Do we have to tell you that the glasses should be clean too? Dirty glasses make for sad, flat, lifeless beer and sad, flat, lifeless beer drinkers!)

TRICKS FOR THE BEST EXTRACT BEER

Respect extract both in its abilities and limitations. You’ll be able to turn out pale ales, IPAs, and stouts from extract that are indistinguishable from all-grain versions once you understand the ingredient. A light beer like a Pilsner or a dry beer like a saison is probably not going to be the best choice for extract; but, with the newer pale extracts that have come on the market, you can get a lot closer than ever before.

Liquid extract can go stale faster than dry extract, so use the freshest liquid extract you can get. Dry extract is more shelf-stable, so we recommend that you use dry extract for your brewing if freshness is in question. Because water has been removed from it, dry extract is more concentrated and contains more fermentable sugars than liquid. So, if you’re brewing a recipe that calls for liquid extract but you replace it with dry extract, use 80% as much dry extract for every 1.0 lb. of liquid extract in the original recipe. Having said that, if your local homebrew store properly stores fresh bulk LME and rolls through it’s inventory regularly, then by all means use liquid. Drew’s local store gets big syrup drums and flushes them with nitrogen as the syrup is dispensed. The LME is fresh as it can be and really does shine in making a tasty extract brew.

There are a ton of specialty extracts out there: light, pale, amber, brown, dark, stout, and many more. We find that unless you have a specific need, like wheat or rye, stick with the palest extracts and get your color and characters from fresh grains.

Why use fresh grains? Extract is great, but you’ll notice that almost every extract recipe contains grains for steeping, which is essentially a simplified version of mashing. We’re not really mashing when we steep, but we’re still extracting “fresh” grain character to put our stamp on the base malt provided by the extract. The general rule of thumb is specialty grains (almost any malt called some variation of caramel, crystal, Cara-, roast, or black) can be steeped. Adjunct grains, such as corn, rice, oats, and wheat, need to be mashed properly, which means mashing them with a base malt, like pale or Pilsner malt. The base malt provides the starch-converting enzymes that the specialty and adjunct grains don’t have on their own.

ADVANCED EXTRACT BREWING

Extract is a great way to get started brewing, but that doesn’t mean that you have to leave it behind when you become more experienced. Both of us have quaffed and judged some great extract beers. Denny has judged Best of Show rounds in competitions where extract beers beat out all-grain beers to win the medal. The point is that, if you know your ingredients and take advantage of your experience, you can make killer extract beer that you can be proud of.

When you brew from a recipe kit it’s probably best to follow the instructions that come with it. After all, that’s the way the person who wrote the recipe intended it to be. But as you learn more about your ingredients and how the brewing process works, you may want to start putting your own recipes together and taking advantage of some tricks that will improve your beer and save you time and effort. Here are a few ideas.

Late Extract

If there’s any complaint about extract that is absolutely valid, it’s that making a light-colored beer is difficult. Think about the amount of time the sugars have been boiled by the time they’ve reached the fermentor. Not only did those sugars boil in your kettle for 60 minutes, they also boiled for who knows how long when the extract was being manufactured. In other words, there’s been a ton of time under ideal conditions for creating darker colors.

So, skip helping make the sugars darker by not adding all of your extract at the start of the boil. We like to recommend that you only add a quarter of your extract at the start, which is enough to help adjust the pH to a better range for hop utilization. Boil according to your recipe, adding hops as you go, and then add the remainder of the extract to the pot with 10 minutes left, which gives enough time to heat-sanitize the whole volume. Remember to take the pot off the heat when adding the remaining extract to avoid the heavy sugars falling straight to the bottom and scorching against the bare metal.

Full-Volume Boil

Until now we’ve been talking about concentrated wort boils—a full boil is the other main trick we know that really gets rid of the “extract beer” feeling. If you can use a burner and a big enough pot (i.e., 7+ gal. for a 5 gal. batch), simply add all the remaining water needed for a full volume boil after the steep. Adding all the water at this stage reduces the color change and allows the hops to add more bitterness and flavor. Speaking of which, if your recipe is designed for a partial boil, you’ll want to back off the hops by some amount when you convert to full boil to keep your brew from being overly bitter. How much? That’s like saying “how long is a piece of string?” Experience will help, but brewing software can be used to determine what the correct amount is. The amount will vary depending on how much volume you boil and what the specific gravity of the boil is.

Use a Chiller

Hand in hand with the full boil, we also recommend getting a chiller of some variety to chill the wort. Copper immersion chillers are far and away the easiest to use, clean, and store. Using one is pretty straightforward, just hook it up to a garden hose (or other cold water source, the colder the better) and drop the coil into your boil with 15 minutes remaining. When done boiling, turn off the burner and turn on the water. Rock the chiller carefully back and forth until you reach pitching temperature or you’re chilling water is too warm to push the wort temperature down further. At that point, you should be ready to chill overnight in a fridge if you’re still above 70°F, or just pitch your yeast if you’re down in the 62–68°F range.

Using a copper immersion chiller is great because it takes minutes instead of hours. Of course, we’re going to try and simplify this step too in a little while, so hang on!

Speed Brewing: Beer in 20 Minutes

The traditional method of brewing beer calls for boiling your wort for 60 minutes or more, with hop additions at various points throughout. But who’s got time for that? One of the beauties of using extract is that so much has been done for you before you even start brewing! You can leverage that advantage to shorten your brew day. Instead of starting your hop additions early on in the boil and leaving them in there for the entire 60 minutes, you can boil for only 20 minutes by simply increasing the amount of hops you use! Later in this chapter we’ll show you some recipes that have been adjusted for the Speed Brewing method.

First, a little background. Hops contain a variety of compounds for bittering your beer and adding flavor and aroma. The longer you boil the hops, the more you extract the bittering compounds and the more you degrade the oils that give you flavor and aroma. Hops are usually boiled for 60 minutes to get bitterness from them, around 15–20 minutes to get flavor from them, and for three minutes or less to get aroma. In order to boil for only 20 minutes rather than 60, you need to increase the amount of hops you use to compensate for the lower alpha acid utilization. Those are fancy terms that describe the actual chemical process, but you can just remember that more boil equals more bitter. Of course, there’s a limit to this, but you get the idea.

So, here’s the trick: in order to boil for 20 minutes rather than 60, look at the amount of hops the recipe uses for the 60 minute boil and increase that amount by 50%. By only boiling the hops for 20 minutes you’ll also increase the amount of flavor you get from them.

In order to speed up and simplify your brew day even more, get an induction burner and a pot made for it. We both use 1800-watt induction plates. They work really well and only cost around sixty dollars in the US; a pot will set you back another thirty or forty dollars.

HOW TO CONVERT TO/FROM EXTRACT

A big challenge for extract brewers is that almost all recipes you’ll find out there are going to be all-grain. It’s probably because almost all the goofs who’ve been bitten by the beer-writing bug went all-grain somewhere along the way. Here are a few tricks and tips for adjusting a recipe from all-grain to extract:

OTHER EXTRACT USES

Yeast Starters

This should be a no-brainer—use malt extract to make your yeast starter. We’ll get more into this in Chapter 10. Frugal minded all-grain brewers like to use the final runnings from their mash tuns to provide wort for their starters, but we appreciate the consistency of extract and knowing what we’re growing our critters in. Plus, it’s way easier to store extract than it is wort.

Simplifying Your Brew Day

If your brew life is anything like ours, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the daily chores and attend to life’s needs while also brewing as much as we’d like. There are tons of ways to gain time during the brew day, but most brewers skip over an easy solution to making more beer in less time, and that’s using extract as part of your brew day. We’re not talking as a starter or booster, but as a way to kick-start an entirely new batch from your leftover sparge water.

Some brewers are precise about their water measurements, using only the exact right amount in the mash tun and the hot liquor tank (HLT, i.e., your kettle full of hot water for sparging and more). But you can take a cue from Drew: he pretty much always refills his HLT throughout the day to have a constant source of hot water, which is handy for cleaning and other purposes. At the end of the day, there is always leftover HLT water that ends up being cooled and recycled for laundry or gardening.

But what about not letting the leftover cool down? If you’re like most brewers, you hold onto a certain amount of your original homebrewing gear. What Drew has started doing to help fill out his beer roster (you know, for beer festivals, research, etc.) is to make sure the HLT is kept full while he is making an all-grain recipe. He can take the already heated water from the HLT into a separate boil kettle and start an extract batch. Using a second burner and kettle, you can easily time it so that your extract batch is done within 15 to 30 minutes of your main all-grain batch. (If you’re horrifically fanatic about brewing, keep repeating that and you can pull off multiple batches in one go. At some point though, you’ll need to knock it off and go to sleep!)

Here follows an extract recipe that’s a perfect example of making your brew day fast and simple. In the past few years sour beers have become extraordinarily popular, with brewers developing new ways to shortcut the traditionally long souring times they require. After all, beer sitting in a tank or barrel is beer not being sold and money not being earned! Kettle souring will be covered in depth in chapter 11, but if you’ve wondered why you see so many Gose and Berliner weisse beers on the market these days it’s because of the simple sour flavor you can obtain quickly with little fuss. You can whip up this beer at the end of your brew day and not have to worry about boiling until later!

RECIPE

Berliner RoggenWhat Extract Kettle Sour

Batch volume: 5 gal. (19 L)

Original gravity: 1.044 (11°P)

Final gravity: 1.004 (1°P)

Color: 5.4 SRM

Bitterness: 1.8 IBU

ABV: 5.2%

Malt

Hops

Yeast/Bacteria

Procedure

Notes

How do you determine if the sourness is where you want it? Some brewers use pH meters and push the sour ferment until the pH hits ~3.5. Winemakers will scoff because pH is a poor indicator of taste impact. They have a test for acidity, but that’s way too complicated for us now. Instead, let your tastebuds be your guide. It may sound fun to push the envelope and go EXTREME with your sourness level, but it’s not a great tasting experience.

Boosters

Just like you should always keep extract on hand for growing up your yeast, so should you keep it on hand for boosting your wort. There are a few ways extract can come in handy for your brew day:

BAKING: THE FINAL FRONTIER

Remember earlier in the chapter when we said, “Hey, you know, we’re lucky to have malt extract for brewing because that’s not why they make the stuff”? Well, here you go—the real reason big maltsters invest time, energy, and money into making extracts is baking. It turns out that malt extract is incredibly hygroscopic, that is, it has a fondness for sucking up and holding onto water. This keeps commercial baked goods moister for longer. The sugars and proteins in malt extract also help in creating beautiful brown crusts with a deep earthy sweetness.

Seriously, go look at the bread in your kitchen. Odds are high that it contains malted barley flour, malt extract, or diastatic malt extract. The diastatic version still contains active enzymes that can attack starches and help make dough more elastic and creates a “fermented” flavor.

How would you go about using your DME? You can replace some or all of a recipe’s sugar content with DME or LME (LME requires adjusting liquid amounts). Start with replacing only a small amount of the sugar with extract before you go all homebrewer crazy with it!

Pretzel Magic

As an example, here is Drew’s modified version of Jeff Renner’s Bavarian Pretzel recipe, which Drew goosed with a little DME and beer to give it some extra “beeriness.” Jeff’s original recipe calls for a small addition of sugar and water.

To make a pretzel a pretzel and not an odd-shaped bun, you must briefly cook the dough in an alkaline water bath. The alkaline environment causes a breakdown of surface proteins found in the dough and encourages Maillard reactions to create that distinctive brown chewy crust. (Jeff’s addition of milk powder boosts this effect as well, so use it!)

Oh, and regardless of lye or soda, do not use aluminum for the water bath. Also, put the pretzels on parchment paper or a silicone mat, not directly on the tray!

RECIPE

Malty Bavarian Pretzels

Yields 12 pretzels

Dough

Lye Bath

Garnish

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400°F/200°C.

2. Sprinkle the yeast into the water with a pinch of sugar to proof for 10 minutes.

3. Whisk together all the dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer with the dough hook attached.

4. Add the yeast slurry to the bowl and turn the mixer onto low speed. Slowly add the beer and let the mixer knead the dough until soft and elastic.

5. Cover the bowl and let rise until the dough has doubled in size (~30–60 minutes).

6. Prepare the lye bath by adding lye to cold water and bringing to a simmer in a non-reactive stainless steel pot. (Not aluminum—Drew destroyed one beefy aluminum pot with a lye bath.) DO NOT ADD LYE (OR SODA) TO ALREADY HOT WATER—THAT’S HOW YOU GET CHEMICAL BURNS!

7. Divide the dough into 12 portions and roll each into an 18-inch rope. Bend into a U-shape, take the two ends and twist them around each other once or twice. Press the ends into the top of the U to form the classic pretzel “praying hands” shape. Rest on a floured surface with the seams down to help encourage a seal.

8. When fully shaped, carefully lower a pretzel into the simmering lye water with a slotted spoon or spider. Allow to simmer for 30 seconds, gently flip and simmer for an additional 30 seconds. The pretzels will expand and change color. Remove and pat dry with a paper towel. Place onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet and sprinkle with salt.

9. Bake the pretzels for 8–10 minutes or until shiny brown. Rest on racks for at least 30 minutes before devouring.

RECIPE

Malted Chocolate Decadence

Serves 12 to 16.

Ingredients

Materials

Instructions

EXTRACT BEER RECIPES FROM DENNY

To brew these recipes, use the directions from the “Oversimplified Explanation of Extract Brewing” earlier in this chapter. All of these recipes are made for the Speed Brewing 20-minute boil.

RECIPE

Red Dog Pale Ale

Drew and I are both pet lovers and we each have multiple dogs and cats. So it stands to reason that we’d name the beverages we love after the pets we love. This one was named for my red border collie, Hannah.

Batch volume: 5 gal. (19 L)

Original Gravity: 1.051 (12.6°P)

Final Gravity: 1.012 (3.1°P)

Color: 15 SRM

Bitterness: 38 IBU

ABV: 5.2%

Malt

Hops

Water

Yeast

Notes

After boiling, cool wort to 65°F (18°C), transfer it to your fermentor, and add the yeast. Ferment at 65–68°F (18–20°C) for 2 weeks, then package.

RECIPE

Happy Dog Stout

This delicious brew was named for Hannah’s buddy, Mabel, a black and white border collie. We said Mabel was “the dog who was always singing a song” because she was such a happy, loving friend.

Batch volume: 5 gal. (19 L)

Original Gravity: 1.055

Final Gravity: 1.015 (3.8°P)

Color: 41 SRM

Bitterness: 59 IBU

ABV: 5.2%

Malt

Hops

Yeast

Notes

After boiling, cool wort to 65°F (18°C), transfer it to your fermentor, and add the yeast. Ferment at 65–68°F (18–20°C) for 2 weeks, then package.

RECIPE

Old Stoner Barleywine

Two of my best friends started brewing about the same time I did in the spring of 1998. By January of 1999, we decided that we needed to get together to brew a batch of barleywine for New Year’s Eve of 1999. If you recall, there was a lot of talk at that time about if the world would survive the transition to 2000, and we wanted to be prepared! (You may also recall how that fear turned out!). Fortunately, the world didn’t end that night, although by the next day we kind of wished it had after drinking all that barleywine! The best part of the story is that nearly 18 years later on Thanksgiving of 2016, my friend Kevin found a bottle that he’d kept all of those years. We opened it up and truthfully it was one of the best beers I’ve ever had the pleasure of putting down my throat. Yeah, you can make some fantastic beers with extract!

Batch volume: 5 gal. (19 L)

Original Gravity: 1.114 (26.8°P)

Final Gravity: 1.028 (7.1°P)

Color: 12 SRM

Bitterness: 132 IBU

ABV: 11.5%

Malt

Hops

Yeast

*Use 2 yeast packets since it’s a strong beer.

Notes

After boiling, cool wort to 65°F (18°C), transfer it to your fermentor and add the yeast. Ferment at 65–68°F (18–20°C) for 4 weeks, then package.

AN INSPIRATIONAL MESSAGE TO ALL THE DOUBTERS

Here’s the other thing, no one—really, we mean no one whose opinion matters—is going to take away your “brewer badge of badassness” because you make any or all of your beer with extract. If they do, feel free to tell them that Denny and Drew told you it’s all good. You can also rest assured they probably feel terribly inadequate about themselves. Let’s save the “judging” for things that really matter, like everyone else’s terrible taste in music!

Seriously, there is nothing wrong with using extract if what you enjoy about beer is putting together an idea and getting it to the glass in the quickest way possible. In fact, we’d argue that not brewing due to time constraints and other complications is the greater sin!

PROFILES IN SIMPLICITY: JAY ANKENEY

If you’ve been brewing for a long enough time, odds are you’ve read a piece by Redondo Beach’s master brewer, Jay Ankeney. Jay is a prolific writer covering the tech and broadcast fields. Back before he decided he needed to “make money at the writing thing,” Jay wrote the Zymurgy For Beginners column for years. He even wrote his own homebrewing book, Easy Beer,5 back when most homebrewing books assumed you knew something about beer right off the bat. (To quote Jay, “I picked up a British brewing book and the first sentence was ‘You must rouse the wort’.”)

So why profile Jay here in the extract chapter? See, here’s what’s different about Jay. Jay’s been brewing for years, longer than either of us. He started in the early 1980s, you know, back when Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. Jay is also somewhat unique because he never switched to all-grain brewing. Throughout the years of enjoying great beer with both of his clubs, Strand Brewers and Maltose Falcons, Jay has amassed an amazing amount of knowledge about beer and mead, all the while making any number of outstanding beverages without needing to cramp his beachside domicile with a mash tun.

There are easy assumptions to make about brewers who keep brewing extract long after the rest of us have moved onto the magic of mashing. “They’re lazy.” “They just want ‘cheap’ beer.” “They’re not real brewers.” “They can’t make all the beers.”

Jay puts to rest those assumptions. When asked why he keeps brewing with extract, Jay offers a few reasons. The first is the issue of space: his place just doesn’t have the space to store a kegerator, a mash tun, and all the other gear you need. But the main reason is the scarcity of that most precious commodity—time. Jay has a busy calendar and would rather be able to brew and get back out in the world doing other things. Start to finish, Jay puts a beer together and the kettles to rest in three hours. Then he’s off to find other adventures.

Also, Jay’s a strange man in other ways. He’s the mythical brewer who loves to bottle. He’ll happily sit for a few hours meditating his way through a round of priming, filling, and capping. Not only does it relax him, but he believes it offers him the chance to have more variety since he isn’t limited by keg capacity. More variety means more brewing!

Jay’s Tips for Extract Brewing

The next time someone tells you “extract can’t make good beer,” well, now you have Jay to point to.

1 Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo, ed. Steve Crist and Laila Nabulsi, biog. Ben Corbett (Los Angeles: American Modern Books, 2006), 33.

2 Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, vol. 1 of The Fear and Loathing Letters, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 280.

3 Kihm Winship, “H.L. Mencken, Homebrewer,” Faithful Readers (blog), May 1, 2012, https://faithfulreaders.com/2012/05/01/h-l-mencken-homebrewer/.

4 Beechum, The Everything Homebrewing Book (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2009); Beechum and Conn, Experimental Homebrewing: Mad Science in the Pursuit of Great Beer (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2014); Beechum and Conn, Homebrew All-Stars: Top Homebrewers Share Their Best Techniques and Recipes (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2016); Palmer, How to Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Great Beer Every Time, 4th ed. (Boulder: Brewers Publications, 2017).

5 Jay Ankeney and Dan Dennis, Easy Beer: A Beginners Guide to Home Beer Brewing (Manhattan Beach, CA: Anthem Enterprises, 1987).