Beer Forum

Any of you brewers splitting up your extract and doing a second late addition to try and reduce carmelization and off tastes ?

I've been playing with this a bit and can't say one way or the other as it whether it definitively improves your brewing results.

Anyone have experience they want to share / methods

- how do you decide how much malt to go late with ?

- what time do you add your second addition of malt extract ?

- what wlse ?

I usually do 2/3 or 3/4 of my LME last 15 minutes of boil. I only do it with my lighter colored beers. I have noticed a difference. but I also think it depends on your cooking surface. right now I use an electric stove top. I had better control with a gas range and not near as much carmelization.

I switched from LME to DME and notice better color and less extract tang. I actually enjoy brewing with DME more than I do all-grain. Use Briess Extra Light DME for a base and you can't go wrong.

Either way, I add extract in three stages. I'll add 1/3 up front, pre-boil, to get enough sugar in the wort to affect hop utilization. Halfway through, I'll add the other 1/3, and then the last part about 15 min before the end of the boil.

Not only is this method "less annoying" when it comes to adding+stirring extract, since it breaks the task into smaller workloads, but it is also less of a heatsink for your boil temperature. Since water won't rise above boil, it's a very fragile state to maintain when you're on a timer.

GSak makes some good points.

I got a response on my blog about my Czech Pils kit I got from Northern Brewer.

http://mikesbrewreview.com/homebrewing- ... experiment

The recipe was about 7 lbls of LME and there was a late addition of it as well. Anyway, my brew turned out really muddy / darker than I expected. Someone commented on my blog about switching over to all DME. I was actually wondering to myself if that would answer my question about late additions.

I always stayed away from them for lack of willingness to bring my temp down 20 degrees, but using more DME would, like GSak says, solve that.

I suppose I'll have to start making my own recipes instead of just buying kits all the time.

I just haven't had the time to look for good software to do it.