Muntons Craft Your Own Malt Extracts
Muntons have launched a new and exciting range of malt extracts that promise to be just as good as all grain! We had to check these out for ourselves…
Canned, sweet
Malt extract is made in the same way as “real” wort: by mashing grains. The end product is then concentrated and packaged to extend its shelf life. This is liquid malt extract (LME). It can also be dehydrated to make dried malt extract (DME).
Beer kits are specially formulated malt extracts designed to create a particular beer flavour. In contrast, most malt extracts sold as LME or DME are deliberately more generic, and usually just come in a range of colours, from light to dark.
You can create your own “beer kit” by adding hops and yeast to malt extract, with the potential to do a mini mash by steeping specialty malts. This is a great interim step between packaged beer kits and all grain brewing, but the lack of choice and flavour in plain malt extract can limit what you can make.
Craft Your Own
Muntons have developed their new range especially for extract brewing. You can choose different types of grain and even specific varieties of malt, and the cans are sized so that you can layer and combine different extracts, just as all grain recipes combine different malts to create rounded flavours.
The range includes:
- Amber
- Dark
- Extra light
- Light
- Hopped amber
- Hopped dark
- Hopped light
- Maris Otter
- Munich
- Oat
- Sour
- Vienna
- Wheat
This is a great set of building blocks to create pretty much any style of beer you can imagine – even mixed fermentation beers with the sour extract!
The hopped varieties are lightly hopped with neutral bitterness, similar to an 60 minute boil addition. This means you can focus additional hopping on high impact flavours and dry hops.
Hop tea
If you have all grain equipment including a large boil kettle and a way to cool your wort, you can simply skip the mash step and begin with diluted extract in your kettle, then boil with hops just as in an all grain recipe. This is a great way to get used to the boil processes in all grain without the additional complexity of mashing and sparging.
However, malt extract doesn’t really need boiling in the same way as an all grain wort does. Boiling wort helps stabilise and clarify the end product, and removes any unwanted enzymes and proteins leftover from the mash. Malt extracft has already been through these processes, so if you want you can skip boiling altogether and simply dilute it as you would with a pre-packaged beer kit.
Hops do need to be boiled, though, to add pleasant bitterness and extra flavour. If you’re not boiling the wort, you can still get the right hopping by making a “hop tea”. This is where you boil your hops in plain water instead, then add this water as part of diluting the malt extract. Don’t forget to sieve out the hop matter!
This method is best suited to later boil additions at the 5 or 10 minute mark as the way bitterness is extracted in plain water is slightly different to in wort. It works very well for whirlpool additions as it’s easier to dial in specific temperatures with a small pan of water.
Recipe time!
Muntons have a fantastic app for creating recipes with the Craft Your Own range, but we thought we’d see how we fare trying to replicate some of our favourite all grain kits with these malt extracts.
To recreate our perennially popular Leffe clone kit, we suggest one can of hopped light extract and one can of wheat extract with the candi sugar and yeast from the main recipe, made up to 23L. We like adding some Hallertau Mittelfrüh as a dry hop to bring this one to life!
For Two Hearted IPA, try one can Maris Otter extract, one hopped light, and one of Vienna extract, with 30g Centennial steeped as a hop tea, and 100g Centennial as a dry hop. Ferment with Lallemand BRY-97. If you make this with 21L water you’ll be closer to the original recipe’s +6% ABV – however, this one works just as well with 23L added to lower the ABV for a more easy-drinking 5.5%.
The great thing about this range is the ease of experimentation. Want to try a hazy NEIPA? Try mixing extra light extract and oat extract, with steeped and dry hops of your choice. (Hint: you can always copy the hopping schedule and amounts from another recipe, such as Lightbulb. This works for yeast and fermentation profiles too!)
All the Muntons Craft Your Own malt extracts are available in our Recipe Generator so you can easily build your own recipes – and share them with other brewers too! Don’t forget the Recipe Generator also allows you to order smaller amounts of malt and hops than buying whole packets – so there’s no leftovers to worry about storing.
Check out our video where we use the Muntons Craft Your Own range to make our own recipes! And remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for all the latest brews and reviews from The Malt Miller.
