Your brew buddy just emailed you the recipe for his or her award-winning American pale ale. You eagerly open the file and discover it’s an all-grain recipe. But you brew from extract. What now? In this Exchange Rates series, we’ll describe how to convert all-grain recipes to extract and partial-mash recipes. This article focuses on base malts. Upcoming installments will cover specialty grains, adjuncts, and hops. We’ll also include a few examples.
Base Malt Varieties
Base malts contribute the bulk of fermentable sugars to all-grain wort. These grains are usually very light in color and range from neutral to toasty in flavor. The following are examples of base malt:
- Two-row (pale) malt. U.S. versions are frequently (but certainly not always) very mild in flavor and serve as the canvas upon which more flavorful malts are applied. British varieties such as Maris Otter often bring nutty and toasty flavors to the party. Two-row pale is the base malt for most American and British beer styles.
- Pilsner malt. The lightest brewer’s malt available, Pilsner malt lends delicate grainy or bready notes to light-colored beers such as Helles, Dortmunder, Tripel, and the malt’s namesake, Pilsner. It also serves as the backbone for most styles of Continental European origin.
- Munich and Vienna malts. These highly kilned malts offer up intense, chewy malty flavors. Although they may be used for up to 100 percent of a beer’s malt bill, they’re more commonly combined with other base malts. Look for them in Oktoberfest, Bock, and other malty German styles.
- Wheat and rye. These malts bring their own unique characteristics to wheat and rye beers.
- Six-row malt. You may occasionally come across six-row in recipes for Pre-Prohibition Pilsner or light American lager, but it’s otherwise fairly obscure. Six-row malt has a rough, husky quality, which is one reason it is often cut with adjuncts such as rice and maize.
The first step in converting an all-grain recipe to an extract recipe is to substitute an appropriate amount of extract for the specified quantity of base malt.