Adding Extract when Brewing Barley Wine

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment, we are going to start getting our water up to a boil, adding our extract, and then getting our boil rolling. As we are getting in close to our boil, say around one-hundred and ninety to two-hundred degrees, we're actually going to turn off the heat now and we are going to add some of our malt extract. First we are going to take our kettle off the main heat. Then we are going to take the malt extract, which has been soaking in hot water, start mixing it in very nice and slowly, trying to make sure that it all gets blended in. Now, a tip that you may not get from a lot of other brew starters is that you don't actually want to add all the malt extract right now. Instead, we're going to add roughly half to two-thirds of the extract. What this will prevent is some of the caramely flavors which are sometimes associated with extract brewing. The rest of the extract we are going to add with about fifteen to twenty minutes left. During this process you want to continually stir to make sure that everything is all mixed together and that none of it is going to be left on the bottom in order to scorch. Now that you've got two-thirds or half of the extract put in, just continually stir it, turn on your heat and start working on getting it up to a boil. In particular, if you're going to be using dry malt extracts, you never want to add that while it's boiling, you want to add that before hand or else it will clump heavily and it will be very hard to break into the solution. As you can see, we are getting very nice and close to a boil. You can start to see some of the first bubbles come up. At this point, it's going to be very important to start controlling your temperature. You don't want a boil-over. At this point, you are going to want to closely regulate your temperature and turn down your heat. Now we are getting a nice boil here and we want to turn down our heat so that we don't reach any high levels. It's going to foam up, but with a little temperature management, you should be okay. "