Brew School #15 steeping grain for a kit beer
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- Steeping grain is a great and easy way to improve the flavour of your kit beers.
I discuss the process and the various grains available to the home brewer.
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This is an excellent layman's term explanation. Love it completely comprehendible and explained the whys and hows without the scientific side of chemical conversions that make many people yawn and eyes gloss over.
Excellent descriptive information John ,now looking at doing this to get better head retention to my lager tin brews 👍🍻🤘🏼
easy way to play with soem extra flavour and charatcer in your brews.
Great Viewing great info Thanks and Cheers
Great video, I brew extract, specialty malt, hops and sugar's, love the variety of beers I can do and not too time consuming. Thank you little John, good u r looking after us extract brewers!
plenty more to come.... got 8 tins waiting to be brewed.
cheers man im gonna spice up a few pov brews with some grain .
yes, man, yes
What a great video! Thanks John. I just don't have the time to move into all grain right now but I do hope to have a crack one day. For now I mainly do tins and have found steeping grains really does make a big difference, especially caramalt in a golden ale
yep, caramalt is yummo in a golden ale.
Great way to improve the beer!
Cheers LJ
you can use a rolling pin with the grain in a bag to crush it.
yes you can.....
It never made much difference to coopers kits for me, but good for the colour . The last beer I did I just did it as the can says but with brown sugar and moltodex which can turn out good. On the lighter malt lagers etc.
That was great! Fantastic explanation I’m gonna try this now
enjoy it mate, easy and a nice bit of extra for your brew. The hands on stuff is good too, feels like your actually impacting the end result.
AWESOME, MAN!!! Steeping is great but when mash is boiled, interesting things occur.
decoction is a whole other realm....
Great video, mate! Have you tried making hazy beers?
I like using regular pre-hopped kits (Coopers Lager or Pale Ale) and turning them into hazy NEIPAs by steeping 250-300g of flaked oats and the same amount of flaked barley. Sometimes I use a bit (~100g of Crystal 15), but I prefer the NEIPAs to be lighter in colour. Of course, a lot of fruity hops added late and more dry-hopped does the trick and true-to-style. Yeast matters too, of course, so I prefer Lallmand East Coast yeast or White Labs Coastal Haze.
I don't do many hazy beers, especially NEIPA's, I don't them quick enough to be viable so mostly just buy them.... it is not my favourite style either in general. I am going to do one soon though to test an experimental process I have been working on.
I do Kit beers and 1st time I tried adding Grain to them I think it was 500g and it totally overpowered the kit flavour. So next time I tried 250g and it still seemed too strong. It was interesting you said you added 150g. I will definitely try this. My question is if you have grains at 70c for 20mins , then after taking the grain out ,are you then ramping the boil up to full boil to kill bacteria? I have only been doing 70-75 then adding it straight to fermenter drum.
you need to boil the wort; 'grain water' for about 5 minutes to kill any bacteria and avoid contaminating your brew. What type fo grain you are adding will have a big impact on how much you need, the darker the grain the less you use. You can use 1kg or more of base malt(pale ale, pilsner, marris otter, vienna etc) but crystal and cara malts are far more intense in flavour. What type of kit are you doing, I can suggest a good grain and amount to try on your next batch.
@@littlejohnsbrewing9199 I currently have Munich Malt grain & Crystal Malt Medium grain. I added 250g Munich Malt to a Belgian Ale and it was overpowering. I have made a Mangrove Jacks Munich Lager a couple times ,just tin , kg be2, 150g LDME, cluster hops and it's been well liked but I feel it's missing something so I was planning to add Munich Malt to this next time but not sure how much. I looked through my notes and I did add only 100g of Crystal Malt med to a Coopers Lager and that turned out ok. But I haven't been ramping up to boil which I will do next time I use grains as you suggested. Any other ideas on what tins I should use Crystal Malt med grain in be welcome.
@@lenheuser8016 righto, let me break this down a bit.... longish answer coming, but hopefully it will help you out. Munich is the 'strongest' coloured and flavoured of the base malts and as such will impart fairly intense properties when added to a brew. Crystal medium is also quite 'strong' in flavour, colour and depth of body. I would suggest that you have not used the right malt for the brews you have listed above. For the most part steeping grain is about boosting the flavour and adding some body and/or mouthfeel to a kit or extract beer. Lighter base malts are best for body without adding a lot of flavour and lighter crystals such as pale, carahell, caraaroma, will work well in lighter beer styles, the deeper crystals like medium, caramunich, carafa and special are the reserve of darker ales and stouts. Some suggestions-- Belgian Ale would benefit from some pilsner, light ale malt or vienna, maybe a touch of carapils or carahell allowing the light malts to shine with just a boost to the body... but belgian's are a very fussy bunch. The Munich Lager would work well with some Munich malt because there will be a high proportion of Munich already in the kit, but you need to allow for the fact that the tin is already close to style for flavour intensity, again if wanting to get that something that's missing, drop the BE2 for 1kg LDM and steep 200gm carapils and 100gm Munich. Also look to use a Noble hop like Hallertau or Hersbrucker. I wouldn't be using crystal medium in any lighter tins, lager, pale ale etc. Keep it for ESB, ambers, dark, mids, porter or stouts which will carry the deep caramel tones and sweetness. Also a good idea to steep 15-25gm of hops with your grain just to help balance up the extra sweetness you will get. Last thing, which is a bit of an aside, if you find your beers are too 'heavy' from steeping but you like the flavour, consider swapping equal parts dry malt for dextrose to help thin it a little, it can undo some of the sins of extra malt and I tend to put 2-300gm in most brews with added malts to counteract the extra body. Check out the video on 'increasing ABV'. there is a good chat about what different additions are doing to your beer and how to adjust as needed.
@@littlejohnsbrewing9199 That was a comprehensive reply and much appreciated and it will be a great help. I will pick up some of those grains you suggest next time I'm at the Homebrew shop. Enjoy your videos, keep up the good content. Cheers
Good info thanks. I have a bag of crushed speciality grain 2 years old sealed in a bag. Can I steep it. It looks ok. Could i taste it first from the bag dry. Thanks. Aldo Also how much hope do I add to the steeping grain (hop pellets ? ) and what about dry hop extract is the the cgeslrst way to go. I want to make a good IPA like the monteiths Phoenix IPA that I love. Some of them hops at the store cost as much as a coppers kit.
2 years old will have lost most of its flavour and possibly taste stale..... I wouldn't use it. Steeping or dry hopping will provide different flavours and levels of added bitterness. For an IPA I would consider a bit of both, steep for 15 minutes and dry hop day 4 or 5 for 3-4 days. Hops in teh steep Simcoe and Chinook, dry hop with Citra.... The beer runs to 40 IBU so target that in your recipe creation.... maybe 15 early addition, 20 in the steep and 5 dry....
@@littlejohnsbrewing9199 thanks. Do citra hops give you that citrus flavour that some IPA have or do u need to add like grapefruit etc in the brew. I like that slight citrus flavour in IPA
@@Matowix Citra, as the name suggest is citrusy, for me it tends towards lemon with an orange note, Mosaic, Amarillo, Centennial, Galaxy and Ed Dorado all add varying types of citrus. Some brewers use grapefruit in the brews to add more citurs notes, I am currently doing a Gose with Blood Oranges..... there are plenty of options. When buying hops, the supplier should provide a description of what the hop will bring to your brew.