The Basic Simple Step By Step Of How I Brew Extract Beer

This is the full step by step method that I use for making my extract beers and ales. It is incredibly simple and a time and time again proven method. This will result in a bodied beer of around 4.5% by volume.

The method I use a involves only boiling a small volume of the wort and dried extract with the hops, and then adding the remaining extract after the boil.  I make batches of 23 litres (5 UK gallons), and my boil volume is 8 litres, which is roughly a third of the full volume.  This has 2 main advantages:

1. Boiling a lower gravity wort will give you a much greater hop utilization.  This means that your beers will come out more bitter, and have a hoppier fresher flavour than if you try and boil a thicker, high gravity wort.
2. It will reduce caramelization of the malt, meaning your beer will turn out a lighter colour and have less of the off flavours that come in heavily reduced tinned beer kits. This is sometime known as "the extract twang"

Remember, when using dried malt, it has already been boiled, so adding at the end is fine.  It just needs to be added to the hot wort in order to sanitize it.

The recipe I am making is called The Way to Amarillo, and is a single hop recipe with amber spray malt.  Please ensure you have a sterilised fermenter and kitchen strainer at the ready! The ingredients are as follows:

1. 3kg Amber Malt
2. 50g Amarillo hops (I use pellets)
3. Ale Yeast (I am using Muntons GV12)

Firstly weigh out 500g of spray malt into a bowl, and split the hop pellets into a bowl of 30g and 2 x bowls of 10g as below:

Bring 8 litres of water to the boil, take off the heat and add the 500g of malt, mix until dissolved and add back to the heat. :

Once it reaches boiling point again, add the 30g batch of hop pellets.  These will be boiled for 1 hour and give the bittering flavour to the beer.

After 40 minutes of boiling, add one of the 10g batches of hop pellets.  This adds the hop flavour and aroma to the beer.

Boil for the remaining 20 minutes.  Once this is complete, remove from the heat.  Add the last 10g of hop pellets for more aroma, and the remaining 2.5kg of dried malt extract.  Mix this thoroughly until all of the lumps have dissolved.

Once mixed, I let it all steep for 15 - 20 minutes or so, and then try and cool the wort as rapidly as possible.  I dont have an expensive wort chiller, so i find the best method is to put the boil pan in the sink and fill with cold water.  Once the water feels warm, I pull out the plug and refill.  I find doing this 3 or 4 times, i can chill the wort down to 40c in under half an hour.

The temperature of the wort will drop even further when it is tipped into the fermenter, and topped up with cold water.

Next add it to the fermenter, through the sterilised kitchen sieve to remove as much of the hop debris as possible.

Now top up the fermenter to the 23 litre mark, check the temperature, and pitch the yeast.

Proceed with the brew as you would any pre prepared canned beer kit and enjoy after a few weeks.  This is undoubtedly the way to make commercial quality ale in the comfort of your own home!  Cheers.