Using health food malt extract

Question

I live in a country where alcohol is banned and of course all equipments and materials related to brewing are banned as well, I tried turning non alcoholic beer into beer a couple of times but the results weren't so great, so I'm trying another method now, but I feel I'm doing something wrong, here are the ingredients I'm using:

• 3x370g malt extract (bought from health food store, the brand name is Meridian)
• 2x500g dextrose
• 50g hops
• baking yeast

I boiled 1 gallon of water then added malt extract and dextrose when they dissolved, I added the hops and boiled for 60 minutes poured the wort into a 5 gallon carboy and filled with water, activated the yeast in 12oz of water and 50g of table sugar then added to the wort, affixed the airlock.

It has been 4 days now, the fermentation process seems to be going fine, but I didn't get the nasty foam I usually get when I turn non alcoholic beer into regular beer, the color is dark brown and VERY cloudy. I don't know if I did something wrong, and I'm afraid to wait for few weeks then get an undrinkable "beer", please let me know if there's anything wrong with my method.

Answer 1

5gals/24L of beer made with 1Kg of (liquid) malt extract and 1Kg of sugar will be rather weak/thin. I would recommend at least 2Kg (or even 3Kg) of malt extract with the sugar in 5gal/24L. Depending on the hop variety the hops might be increased to (for example) 100g, especially if more malt is added. Meridian is quite a dark ("amber") coloured extract so this will yield a mid tone beer.

Baking yeast - often not a bad yeast but may well give some problems trying to ferment higher alcohol beer. Maybe better to use a high attenuation brewing yeast like Safale04 or Safale05 or Danstar "Nottingham". It may also be worth trying to use a higher temperature yeast unless you have air-con to keep things around 20C.

It might be worth noting that there is no need to boil the malt extract for 60 minutes - only the hops. My preferred method is to boil the hops alone in water and then strain the boiling water to the fermenting vessel and maybe wash the hops with more boiling water. Then add the extract and sugar to the boiled water in the fermenting vessel and stir it into solution. The boiled water will pasteurise the extract and sugar. Then add tap water (or what you prefer) to the vessel to make up the volume to that desired. The wort is sufficiently cooled by this process that the yeast starter can be added immediately.

The beer already brewing could be adjusted with more malt (not really sugar) and kept brewing but it may be best to let the current brew complete and adjust the recipe for the next one. It is worth noting that beer improves greatly when aged in the bottle. Two months is good but 6 months gives much better results. Good luck with the desert brewing!

Answer 2

4 days into fermentation your beer surely will be cloudy as hell, so no worries on that front. It will start cleaning up in a week or so. You may then want to facilitate that process by adding small amount of gelatin solution (google "clarifying homebrew with gelatin"). Color-wise, you should expect malt extracts to have that amber-brown colour, it's just an artifact of industrial malt extraction and drying process (Maillard reaction etc). Your process looks OK, all things considered.