DME & LME

[Darrin Smith]

Anyone done big beers but had to top up using extracts instead of grain due to pot size?  What does LME & DME equate to in base malt kilos?

 

cheers

[JR]

That depends on what efficiency you are able to get out of your base malt.  If you only get 60% out of your grains it will be quite different to if you get 90% out of your grains.

 

LME is about 20% water so you will need to use more LME than for DME.  Also DME keeps better but old LME looses quality.

 

Someone online reccons that 

1 kg grain = .75 kg LME = .6 kg DME

and I think that they might be about right (without checking on brew software.)

 

For my really big beers I mash and see what I get from that then add DME to get to the gravity I was aiming for (adjusted for boil volume.)

[Darrin Smith]

sweet, so you just cool a sample and add to suit?

[JR]

Yep - just mash as much as you can with your speciality malts.  Once you have it in the pot, take a sample and cool it, see what the gravity is then add DME to reach your goal.

 

 

 

 

[David Winter]

Ha, I was doing just this calculation o the weekend - if you trust my pen and paper conversions from ppg to "points per kg per L" then 1 kg of DME has ~375 points to add. So, if you took a reading and worked out how many points you needed then the amount of DME should be

 

mDME = points.needed * ( final.vol/375)

 

If you had 23 L of wort at 1050 and were aiming to top it up to 1070 you'd need 20 points or...

 

mDME = 20 * (23 / 375)

          ~ 1.2 kg of DME

[Darrin Smith]

awesome cheers David