I bought 2 no boil kits, so we can try our hand at beer flavoring. My question is the target ABV of these kits are 3.63% I plan to add 1 lb. of DME to boost the ABV a bit, I plan to add 1 lb. of honey to flavor the Wheat beer kit, is there a way to figure out how much this will boost the ABV?
Most of the people here are probably unfamiliar with these kits. What is the volume of beer you are going to make?
Both are about 35 points per pound added to one gallon.
It will make 5 gallons.
Here’s an extract calculator from Brewers Friend.
I plugged in 5 pounds of LME and that gave me 3.50% ABV, when I added another pound of DME it bumped it to 4.35%, so not quite 1% ABV. That’s about what I expected.
3.63% seems really low, even for a wheat beer, what’s the other style?
For 1 pound of honey in 5 gallons:
35 pppg divided by 5 gallons = 7 points or 0.007, which would be expected to raise final ABV by about 0.7%. How’s that for some quick math!
EDIT: And DME has about 45 pppg, so then you get about 0.9% instead, as a rough estimate, which is consistent with others above.
My bad. LME is 35ppg. Oops
I found the instructions on the website and they told me the O.G. and the F.G.,
using that the final ABV will be 4.20% I know we could pull off a great honey wheat beer, how much honey is too much?
O.G. 1.040-1.044
F.G.: 1.008
Gives a final ABV of 4.20%
Too much is when the alcohol level is a lot higher than where YOU want it.
YOU are the brewer. YOU make the rules.
A few thoughts:
While you can come up with a ballpark estimate of FG in advance, you won’t know the actual number until the beer is finished fermenting.
Honey is pretty much 100% fermentable. That means that that it will boost the OG, but shouldn’t affect the FG. To come up with a better estimate of ABV, when I use 100% fermentable sugars I use a calculator to estimate the FG without the sugar/honey/molasses/etc., then I calculate the OG with the sugars included. I use those two values (OG with sugar, FG without) to estimate an ABV.
As far as how much honey you can use, you can go as high as you want. The more you use, the more it will taste like a braggot (a mead made with malt sugar) rather than a beer. For a typical honey ale, especially a low-gravity one like your recipe, I would start with 1 to 1.5 pounds of honey for a 5 gallon batch as a good starting point. That generally gets you to a point where it still tastes like beer, but the honey does come through as well.
I like what you just said!
Fantastic!
Muntons kits are English. 5 English gallons = 22.7 litres. 5 US gallons =18.9 litres.