So this was something a little different for me. From my first brew to today I have only brewed using the all grain method. About a month back I was helping a friend bottle some of this sour beer and he asked me if I would like to brew along with him. He uses a partial mash method in which I am not that familiar with. He bought me supplies and by the end of the day I didn’t have time to brew my own batch his way so I brought everything back to my house and set up there. I started with steeping the grains in 2 gallons of 150 degree water for 30 minutes. With about 10 minutes to go in the steep I heated up another gallon of water to 170 degrees (This will be my sparge water). When the steep was finished I strained the grains from one pot to another and when the grains drained of all liquid I poured the sparge water over the grains to get what sugars were left. I squeezed out whatever I could from the grains through the strainer and began my boil. I boiled the sweet wort for 60 minutes and added my hops 5 minutes from the end of the boil to make sure I didn’t extract too many IBU’s. This beer is going to be using souring bacteria and yeast and if your IBU’s are too high it will affect the way your beer ferments. I used East Coast Yeast ECY20 BugCounty as my only culture for this experiment. It’s been sitting for about a month now and finished up its primary fermentation about 14 days in. I’m getting a lot of fruit on the nose at the moment, peaches and pineapples with a little bit of tartness. I’ll be moving this beer into a secondary fermenter this weekend and brewing the same beer but all grain this time. To get the exact recipe I had to calculate the Dry Malt Extract (DME) to grain. I found a great article on Brew Your Own about how to convert extract to all-grain. From reading this article you can figure out that 1 lb of DME will give you a gravity of 1.045 per gallon. So I took the recipe I had from the extract brew and calculated it out.
Extract Recipe
6 lbs – Extra Light Dry Malt Extract (DME)
8 oz – CaraPils
8 oz – Crystal 10L
All-Grain Recipe
8.25 lb – Pale 2-Row
8 oz – CaraPils
8 oz – Crystal 10L
As you can see, you need to use more grain than extract for an all-grain recipe but it still ends up coming out cheaper if you go the all-grain method. DME can be pretty expensive and grains are relatively cheap. Comparing the price of my extract brew to all grain I can save about $10 by choosing all-grain. I paid roughly $25 for my extract and specialty grains and I paid $15 for 9.25 pounds of total grain.
I’ll be brewing this beer over the weekend so I’ll check back with a full report on how well this came out.
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