just got my new issue of the northern brewer catalog in the mail today and found this interesting...apparently there's a whole bunch of them at midwest. has anyone played around with these? is there really any benefits to doing a 20 minute boil vs a 60 minute?
-40 minutes on the boil would limit you to non-IPA (low/medium IBU) kits I imagine, but other than that sounds doable. Just how much in the way of hops do they give you? No real benefits...other than time savings. 60 minute boils are kind of the standard/minimum for most beers
Basically a hop-bursted extract kit. No need to boil the extract except to (potentially) sanitize. In fact, there are advantages, as mentioned in the original post. I tried a no-boil pils made from an extract kit once. It was unbelievably excellent.
I did a ten minute boil on a saison at the end of the spring. Two cans of pilsner extract and 1.25oz of Citra stirred into a boiling kettle, 6.8oz of belma at FO, 30 min steep/whirlpool, fermented with belle saison, and dry hopped with some centennial and Amarillo. Made for a great summertime beer.
My LHBS has had a couple of no-boil kits on tap. I have been quite surprised at how good they were. However, I think the "darkening of the wort" thing is more of a sales pitch than a real concern. I have intentionally tried to darken the wort by boiling part of it for an hour, then the rest of it added in for two more hours, and I couldn't tell the difference, truth be told. It was all pilsner malt, and it was very light in color when it was done. But there's no reason you couldn't get a fine beer with a 20 minute boil, as long as the DMS thing was taken care of (which it should be with extract, IIRC).
Not really, in that the extract is extracted from wort that has already been boiled. If using unhopped extract, one needs only boil as long as is needed for appropriate bitterness from the hops. Hop bursted beers are perfect for short boil times when using extract.
Interesting to see all of these products coming on the market that seem to take all the 'work' out of home brewing. The other day there was a thread about some $1300 machine that will basically do the whole job for you. Now there's no-boil extract beer kits? Who knew? Looks to me like there are a lot of people out there who would like to get into homebrewing, if only they didn't have to actually brew the beer themselves. Or at least some marketers who believe there are.
There have been no boil kits for a long time. You can still buy some of the old school hopped LME cans that were designed for beers that don't have much in the way of flavor/aroma hops. I seem to recall that a couple of recipes in The Joy of Homebrewing are based around these with some steeping grains and late hops added in.
The most fully modified ones have the least DMS (actually DMS precursors) in them. The maltsters spec sheets have indicators of modification (Kolbach, etc.)
