My girlfriend asked me to make her a batch of Scotch ale, so I've been shopping for the ingredients to make the wee heavy recipe in Brewing Classic Styles. One thing that it asks for is a small amount of Munich LME, just 0.25 lbs. Since I'm planning on cutting the recipe in half, that lowers it to a paltry 1/8 of a pound, and suddenly the prospect of buying 3 lbs of Munich LME starts to seem pretty wasteful. I was thinking of getting DME instead so that I could conserve what's left, but the thing is, I can't find Munich DME anywhere. So what would you do in this case? I was wondering if I could add some Munich malt to my steeping grains and get something approaching the right flavor. The 5G all-grain version of the recipe calls for a half-pound of Munich, ie twice the weight of LME, so I was going to add a quarter pound for my half recipe and steep it for 30 minutes at about 160F. Would that get me roughly where I need to be? I was going to use 1 gallon of water for steeping, since originally I would have had 1 lb of steeping grains, but I would bump that up to 1.25 gallons water to accomodate the extra quarter-pound of Munich.
Steeping won't give you the gravity; and I honestly don't think much of the flavor. I'd just skip the Munich LME altogether and use a substitute of pale or caramel to get the gravity.
I wouldn't steep Munich. It really should be mashed. I would say do a mini-mash rather than a steep, but if you simply add 1/8 lb of Munich to a whole pound of specialty grains, those enzymes are going to get pretty diluted. i.e. effective diastatic power would be very low. That pretty much leaves substituting something else for the munich or doing a separate mini-mash with just the munich. ETA: OR... substitute some 2-row for some of the base extract, and do a mini-mash with the 2-row, munich, and specialty grains.
Is there any reason you don't want to use a tried-and-true extract kit? Both of these have great reviews. NB Scottish Wee Heavy Karl's Ninety 90 Shilling
I took a look at both of those kits' recipes. They both steep Biscuit Malt, which I wouldn't recommend. Though I imagine enough people are happy with the results to make the kits profitable.
The 90/- recipe looks somewhat close to the one that I'm going to make (OG aside), but the wee heavy one doesn't use any English malt extract (like the Maris Otter in the 90/- recipe), and that's something Jamil recommends highly for this style of beer. The NB kit might do the job, but I want to make this a smaller batch, so a 5G kit would be overkill. I'm also trying to free myself from reliance on kits, even though I'm open to using them again in the future. From a technique standpoint, how would a partial mash with Munich malt be different from steeping it? Do you leave it in the water longer? Do you need more water? Sorry, I haven't dipped my toe into partial bashes or BIAB stuff yet.
For mashing you need enough time, proper temperatures, a reasonable water to grist ratio, and enough diastatic enzymes to convert the starches in the grains. So...all mashes are steeps, but not all steeps are mashes. i.e. you can do a steep without meeting all the mash requirements. But if you (non-mash) steep grains other than crystal/roasted malts/grains, you end up with starches in the wort.
I've not brewed a Wee Heavy yet, have only had a couple in my lifetime, don't really know what biscuit malt is or why steeping it isn't great. Unless @MCBanjoMike's girlfriend is some kind of uber Scottish beer aficionado, I doubt she'll know the difference. I just threw them out to save wear and tear on Mike here.
The reason steeping biscuit malt isn't great is that it contains unconverted starches, which are generally not desirable in beer, from both a clarity and shelf stability perspective.
So if I wanted to mini mash this, I think I will have a problem because of how little grain I will be working with. I have 1/4 lb of grain to mash, which (according to How to Brew) should be mashed in 1/4 to 3/8 of a liter of water. That's such a small amount of water that keeping it at a fixed temperature for an hour would be very difficult, I think. So should I just give up on the Munich and toss in enough pale DME to compensate? The recipe might suffer, but it's such a small percentage of Munich that hopefully it won't be too noticeable. I'll need to buy some DME to make a starter for this one anyway, so it won't really add to the cost.
Firstly, given the amount of Munich Malt mentioned I would recommend just nixing the use of Munich Malt for this particular batch. As regards: “So if I wanted to mini mash this, I think I will have a problem because of how little grain I will be working with. I have 1/4 lb of grain to mash, which (according to How to Brew) should be mashed in 1/4 to 3/8 of a liter of water. That's such a small amount of water that keeping it at a fixed temperature for an hour would be very difficult, I think.” It is pretty easy to maintain mash temperatures for small amount of grain. Simply place the mash in your oven and set the temperature for 150°F. As the old commercial goes: set it and forget it (for 1 hour). Cheers!
Ah yes, the oven. Didn't think of that! So it would actually be pretty simple to mini-mash this: dump the grain into a cup and a half of water, put it in the oven, dump it into my wort through a strainer once it's boiling. Any objections? Should I rinse the grains with some water at the mash temp after adding the liquid to the kettle? I know this is a lot of fiddling for a half-pound of grain, but it will also be educational, so I don't mind doing it.
I'm not sure how big your overall batch is but .25 lb of munich lme doesn't seem like it would have much impact. Without getting into partial-mashing, etc., I would just replace it with regular lme or consider steeping some Caramunich. Won't be exactly the same but probably won't be much different.
