Well, I have home-brewed about 4 batches of beer already and all of them using either kits or extracts. My first extract brew didn’t turn out so well, mainly because I was a cheapskate and wanted to skim on ingredients. And the truth is, using kits is exactly the same as using extracts since they are basically the same process. The thing I discovered about using kits and extracts is that although it does taste nice (if fact it taste better than a lot of commerically available beers), there is still a lot of room for improvement.

I guess one of the steps is to use grain. No, I am not going to use all-grain as this process requires a big investment in equipment and since I am living in a housing board flat in Singapore, I don’t have the space for a 6-7 gallon stainless steel pot. You can’t really do all-grain without that big mother of a pot. And just imagine the burner needed to boil that 5 gallon of wort. People who do all-grain usually do it outdoors and they use propane burners to boil their wort. So I think the next best thing is to use steeping grains.

Just what is steeping grains? Well, instead of just using dry or liquid malt extract, you get some of the malt or the sugars from the grains itself. So, you need to steep the grains in warm water and this will extract the malt flavours from the grains to your wort. It is sort of like in between all-grain and all-extract. What brewers normally do is to use some base malt to get the freshess and the taste from the grains, then add more malt extract to make up the rest of the bulk of the wort. Yes, it’s not the best solution, but it’s practially and economically as well. It will also improve the quality of the beer. Base malt grains are not expensive and there is only one or two additional steps - steeping the grains and achieving the hot break.

So what steeping grains brewers do is to steep their grains in warm water (at a certain temperature) and after a while, they will take out the steeping grains and add in the rest of the malt extract. However, it is important to note that unlike those malt extracts we buy from the store, you need to create the “hot break” to leech out the proteins and other stuff from the malt that we extracted from the grains. We don’t want these proteins in our beer as they will affect the colour, the taste and the mouth feel of the end product. So you need to do a rolling boil and achieve the hot break. Plus you will need to do a proper “cold break” as well. Cold break here means that you cool down the wort as fast as possible. This will prevent beer haze.

Anyway, I am keen to try out this method. However, my stainless steel pot can only hold 8 litres of liquid. This means that I can only do a 6 litre wort because of the hot break. We don’t want the pot to be too full and then create a big mess in my kitchen. Cleaning up dried wort is very very back breaking work you know. Well, let’s see how it goes. Maybe I will be buying a 12 litre pot to do this.