Going With the Grain

It's been a while since I've brewed a batch. Trying to align the busy schedules among our six-member brewing crew, The Hoplings, isn't easy. So I've been spending the past couple of months reading books, Web sites, and magazines about beer and beer-making while collecting the necessary equipment to brew "all-grain" batches.

For those very new to brewing, there are essentially three versions of a homebrewing recipe. There's the extract version, which is considered the easiest method since it requires less time and know-how. It's kind of like buying pre-made pasta sauce when making spaghetti. As with commercial sauces, there is a wide variety of malt extracts available—both dry and liquid, and with a range of color and flavor characteristics—but you are still limited to what is on the shelf.

All-grain brewing, by contrast, is like making the pasta sauce from scratch, and is thereby considered more challenging than extract brewing. Instead of buying malt in a prepared form (already extracted by companies called maltsters), an all-grain brewer purchases types of grains, cracks them with a mill, and uses a heating process called "mashing" to withdrawal and collect the sugary water that is a key ingredient in beer. (Mashing is different than "steeping," by the way. I'll be covering the topic of mashing in greater detail as I begin to brew all-grain batches.) Carrying on with the pasta analogy, this method allows you to customize your sauce, making it thicker or thinner, more or less potent, and unlike anything you can buy in a store. In fact, there are no available extracts for certain types of grains used in beer-making.

The third approach to a beer recipe is called a "partial mash," which is viewed as an intermediate stage between extract and all-grain brewing. It's similar to jazzing up a basic, store-bought pasta sauce with some other ingredients you prefer: you conduct a small-scale mash and then use malt extract to bring the amount of fermentable sugars to the desired level.

I used to believe there was little difference between the three methods and that you could use whichever you wanted depending on the time and money you had available. See, all-grain brewing takes longer but can be cheaper in the long run because you can buy ingredients in bulk and store them. Extract brewing takes only two to three hours and, unlike all-grain, can be easily managed on your kitchen stove top.

My opinion changed, though, while reading Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. It's a complex book and still a little over my head, but I found this passage in Chapter 3 to be incredibly enlightening:

Data on winning beers demonstrate that you can make great beer using extract as the base for your creation; however, they also tell us that grain plays an important role in virtually every beer recipe. You can certainly make drinkable beer from nothing but extract, but to make truly wonderful beer, you will want to add some grain to the mix.

How much grain is enough? Well, ultimately that depends upon the recipe and the style you are brewing. In general, however, 25 to 67 percent of the gravity of your beer should come from grain.

After reading that, it was clear to me: I needed to add the capability to mash—to conduct either full or partial mashes—to my brewing regimen. And after months of researching and collecting equipment, I'm finally ready.