Considering going back to LME brewing

Your beer. Your rules. I'm sure anyone who tells you are wrong is, well, wrong.

Used to be dry yeast and extract made terrible beer. But not the case now. Do a full wort boil with fresh ingredients. You just lose some recipe flexibility and gain a few hours.

I advocate DME wheat beer in particular. I think some of the better wheat beers I have made were from DME and not having to sparge wheat is a bonus.
Cheers

 

I'm very happily a partial mash / extract brewer. I exclusively use DME for my extract additions, but as said above your-beer-your-rules.

 

There are plenty of high quality malt extracts, both liquid and dry, available these days for brewing. Needless to say your costs for ingredients will be larger but your brew day will be shorter.

Some homebrewers have strong preferences for certain malts (e.g., Thomas Fawcett Pearl Malt) so they likely will continue to brew all grain. The other aspect of all grain brewing is that you can 'control' the fermentability of the wort via mash temperature selection.

But the bottom line is that you can indeed produce high quality homebrewed beers using malt extract. Give it a go!

Cheers!

 

I stopped brewing for a few years due to the time and labor. After 3-5 years off, I started again with DME. If you purchase 50lb bags when a store is running a sale and free shipping, it tremendously helps on the cost. I've since sold off my old equipment and now use an electric all-in-one and do all-grain again. Not as quick as DME, but it's simple and easy vs. my prior setup.

 

The latter. My recipes are a combination of mashed grains augmented with DME to get the gravity I want. I typically mash/sparge 6-10 lbs of grain then add DME during my boil.

I started out doing Mr. Beer kits. Quickly moved to steeping specialty grains with LME. Very short jump from steeping grains to mashing, and replacing LME with DME since I find it easier to handle. That's where I've settled in- I thought I might continue on to all-grain, but I've been very happy with my current process. I have done a very low gravity beer or two all grain, but it's essentially my same process without adding the DME.

 

Agree with everyone else that DME is the way to go over LME.

 

...and that an electric all-in-one all-grain system (can also do extract!) is the way to go over DME.

 

another vote for DME. When i extrat brewed, i also would buy 50 lb sacs of DME and made good beers. I would partial mash specialty grains. just be sure to store the DME so it wont get cakey from humidity.

 

My last batch was DME base. Sometimes it helps with time. No shame in that.