Coopers Light Malt Extract, when to use it

Coopers Light Malt Extract is a tin of concentrated wort, which is to say somebody else has already done the mashing and the boiling and reduced the result down to a syrup, and all you are doing is dissolving it back into water. It carries a reputation as a beginner's ingredient because it turns up in so many first brews, and that reputation gets it skipped by people who would still be better off using it.

What it does that sugar will not

Plain brewing sugar ferments out almost completely, so it lifts your alcohol and leaves nothing behind, and a beer built mostly on sugar is the classic thin homebrew that tastes a bit cidery and disappears off the palate. Malt extract ferments out too, but it leaves unfermentable material behind as well, and that material is what gives you body in the mouth, a head that stays put, and a malt flavour underneath the hops instead of a gap where one should be.

That is the whole argument for it. If somebody hands you a homebrew and it tastes thin, the fix is almost always more malt and less sugar rather than anything to do with the hops or the yeast.

Liquid or dry

They do the same job and the difference is entirely practical. Liquid extract is sticky and it is easier to deal with in bulk, so it suits being the base of a batch. Dry malt is a powder, which means you can weigh out a small amount without wearing half of it, and it keeps better once the packet is open. Plenty of people end up with both on the shelf for exactly those reasons.

Four jobs worth reaching for it on

• Replacing part of the sugar a kit calls for, which is the single easiest improvement you can make to a tin brew.
• Building a recipe of your own from extract rather than working from grain, which gives you full control over the malt without needing a mash tun.
• Lifting the body of a light beer that keeps coming out watery on you.
• Making a yeast starter, where you want a small amount of proper wort rather than sugar water.

How much, and where the numbers come from

The quantities depend on your batch size and on what you are aiming at, and they are printed on the tin, so work from those rather than from a figure you read somewhere, because a guess here moves your starting gravity and therefore moves everything downstream of it. If you want to sanity check a recipe before you buy anything, bring it in and we will run through it with you at the counter.

Keeping the rest of the tin

Once it is open, get whatever you have not used into a clean sealed jar and put it in the fridge. Liquid extract will take on whatever is around it if you leave it open in a cupboard, and there is no reason to lose half a tin to that when a jar sorts it out.

Shop related products

• Coopers Light Malt Extract 1.5kg. The tin this post is about.
• Coopers Light Dry Malt 500g. The powdered version, easier for small additions.
• Coopers Dark Malt Extract 1.5kg. Same idea with colour and roast in it, for stouts and dark ales.
• Coopers Brew Enhancer 1 1kg. A blend of dextrose and maltodextrin if you would rather not measure malt at all.

Did you know the malt shelf in the shop runs wider than the website does. We also carry a light malt extract in 500g, a dried dark malt, a malt blend booster and Gladfield medium crystal malted grain, none of which go online because they carry our supplier's branding. Give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf before you drive in.

The part of the range that is online is in the homebrew collection and the rest of the gear is under beer supplies. If you would rather work a recipe out first, Brewhilder is our homebrew helper and it will talk you through it.

Read next

• How to Brew Beer with Liquid Malt Extract
• Coopers Light Dry Malt 500g, what it does in your beer
• Homebrewing on a Budget: What You Actually Need to Start

Cheers, Candeece. My general rule is that if you are deciding between more malt and more sugar, it is more malt, and I have yet to hear a decent argument the other way.