Enkle – Extract Belgian single

Alrighty. Its been a while since I have brewed an extract beer. Its also been a while since I have brewed a 3 gallon batch. But doing both today!

I am running down the procedures for a newer brewer who wanted to do this beer, so I guess this will be a step by stepper.

The recipe is a Patersbier, or a Belgian single… Enkle. For this 3 gallon extract batch im going with:
-3 lbs dry pilsen malt
-⅛ lb of Melanoidin malt
-1oz Saaz (2.2 AA) @60
-.25oz Saaz @ 15
-Abbaye ale dry yeast

I am going to do a full boil and chill with my chiller,, but an ice water bath would be just fine with a 3 gallon size like this.

First off,, water calculations

I will be using distilled water with the extract (but any good water will work)
I want 3.25 gallons of wort into the fermenter plus another .4 gallons for boil.off.
(Not enough grains to worry about here. But if you’re still worried.. they will soak up. .0125 gallons of that water)
So it looks like I need 3.65 gallons TOTAL water.

Making the beer

I poured 2.65. gallons of that distilled water into my kettle and fired up the heat.
Note: We are saving 1 gallon of the room temp water to dissolve our extract so it doesn’t clump up and sink to the bottom of the kettle and burn

Meanwhile, Crush that little bit grain and put it in your mesh bag. And also start weighing out your hops.

Once your water temp hits 155, turn off the heat, throw that bag of grains, put the lid on and let it sit 10 minutes.
(This is getting all the goodness out of the grain)

After 10 minutes, stir that bag around a little and take the bag out, squeeze the wort back into the kettle. (You can get rid of those grains now.)

Fire the heat up again. This time we are heading to boil.

While that is heating up, find a big pitcher or large bowl (or stainless bucket) to mix the extract. (You can do it in batches if you don’t have something large enough)

Dump or scoop the extract into the pitcher (or bucket) add your water that you saved, and stir the fuck out of it until it’s desolved. Put this aside until you get to the boil.

Soon as you do hit boil, turn the heat off again and pour in that water/extract mixture while stirring the kettle. We don’t want any missed lumps sinking to the bottom.

(If you needed to do a second batch of extract mixture with that room temp water, do so now. After fully stirred with no lumps, mix that into the kettle now as well)

Soon as you feel there are no lumps or clumps left you can turn the heat back on to get back to boiling. (No lid)

Ok now, once you hit that boil, set your timer for 45 minutes and add in your 1oz pile of Hops with a quick stir.

You now have 45 minutes to clean up what you can, get your chiller ready.

When the 45 minute timer goes off, keep the heat on but reset the alarm for 15 minutes,
Add in your .25oz pile Saaz hops, and put your chiller into the boiling kettle to sanitize. (Or start getting your water bath and ice ready)
(The boil is going to stall here but it will catch up quick enough.. keep the timer going)

When the 15 minute alarm goes off, the boiling is done, so turn the heat off and start chilling. (With chiller or water bath. Either way.. keep stirring and checking temps)

Once it chills down to 80 ish. I’m gonna dump it into my fermenter, take a grav reading and pitch the yeast.

Close up your fermenter and air lock it. This Abbaye yeast like it warm so keep that in mind.

That’s it. Done! Easy and fun.

Pretty easy stuff here, but we will talk about doing late extract editions and other fun stuff later. For now though, this is the easiest way to extract brew.