converting recipes all grain to extract

[timbo41]

Evening all. I have been browsing the forum and other sites to gain a better understanding of extract brewing having decided to give it a go! Found out a lot of stuff of special interest to me was how to convert an all grain base malt to its equivalent LME or DME weight. What i havent been able to find out is what steep speciality malts can be used as a substitute for mash only malts eg what can be used as a possible substitute for , say, munich malt in a recipe without the need to do a mash, just steeping in a grain bag for half hour or so. If anyone can post a link or has any deep knowledge i would really appreciate it. This side of the hobby seems to have much greater scope than modifying kits

[RobWalker]

With extract you are limited with the amount of malts you can use. You can partial mash them however, it's pretty easily done on a small scale. Just perform a regular mash but with 1kg or so of malt - I do it all the time.

Things you can't use without mashing are specific types of pale malt (wheat, munich, vienna, etc) anything flaked/rolled/torrified (wheat, barley, rice,) and you can't extract the sugars from crystal etc. Any colour and flavour malts can be steeped for half an hour, or thrown into the boil in small quantities (no more than 100g or so as you extract tannins) and Cara type malts are very useful in extract brewing, especially CaraPils which adds loads of head retention and mouthfeel, as they only need to be steeped to act as if they were part of an all grain batch.

To convert, I put them into beersmith. Bear in mind if you're performing a boil with less water that you will need to calculate the hops again as you extract less bitterness.

SImply, you just have to compensate as best you can, or partial mash. There's not much in the way of other options.

[timbo41]

A concise and comprehensive reply cheers