What’s the difference between booster and LME? Want to know how the impact they have on your beer? Well check out our first episode of Brew Talk with Mr. Beer and find out.

Video Transcript

All right I think we are alive. Give it a few minutes here. Let some people join. If you guys can hear me, just let me know. It's our first Mr Beer live video.

Looks like we got two viewers in there now, which is good. We’re probably going to give it a minute or two, to get some more people to join before we start talking about our topic today. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah, it seems like everything's working well. So we, we'll give it another minute and then we'll hop into our topic today. I am drinking a collaboration between Coronado and Belching Beaver brewery today, a hazy IPA, one of my favorites. So yeah, so we'll give it to you about the two-minute mark and then we'll get started guys, if that sounds good.

All right, so about 30 seconds and then we'll get going. I think to start these will be a little slow at first as we kind of work out the kinks and get used to how long it takes everybody to join. So we'll give it about another 10 seconds.

All right, so we have some people on, we welcome you to the very first installment of Mr Beer live. Since this is our first kind of try out, of hopefully have many episodes that we're going to try and do on a weekly basis. I kind of want to lay out the structure ahead of time so you guys know what to expect and then next time you can join, and we'll give you a better heads up of when we'll be doing these. You can plan out your schedule a little bit accordingly. We’re going to cover a brewing topic related to Mr Beer for five to 10 minutes then open up to Q&A at the end of the show. If you're not able to watch the weekly video, we will upload them on our Facebook page.

We're going to upload them to YouTube and hopefully on the blog on our website so you can go back and look at the topics that we're talking about and stuff like that or if you missed it when I reference an old topic you can see all that information. Why we're on the topic of social media. I think most of you do follow us on Facebook. Check out our Instagram page and YouTube account as we're posting these videos more often that will help you keep up to date and kind of what's going on and what's new. We also had something that's new if you guys want to join. Last week we started the Mr. Beer Facebook group, it’s called Mr. Beer's Brewing Society. We’re inviting everyone who's brewing with Mr. Beer to join, who wants to learn about Mr. Beer.

I think it's going to have a lot of information on there. We've had a ton of activity in the first week. So far we are about 200 members and almost 2000 posts and engagement. So to the people that are in the group that are watching, thanks for your help in getting that going for us. So let's dive into today's topic.

We're going to talk about the difference between a Booster and LME. So, if you brew with Mr. Beer you know, we have boosters and we have a pack of LME. The booster is basically made up of corn syrup solids consisting of 8% glucose, 56% malt, maltose 16% maltotriose, and 20% dextrin’s. The booster is going to provide a full balance range in both fermentable and unfermentable sugars.

The booster will mimic the carbohydrate profile of your wort, which is very scientific information. In case you guys are wondering, each pouch of booster is going to approximately add about 0.6% of alcohol into your beer, or 1.3% if you use two of them. We use these in our Standard Mr. Beer Refills. If you're ordering the Standard Refill from www.mrbeer.com you'll get two packets of these and those will increase your beer to roughly 5% ABV.

We also sell several liquid malt extracts, or LME, which come in a nice little silver pouch like this, and these are packets of unhopped malt extract. LME is going to add more mouth feel and flavor to your beer by increasing the abv by about 1%.

So if you're looking to really get more flavor and more body, and more mouth feel when you drink your beer, you're going to want to go with an LME. We have four different styles depending on what beer style you're brewing. We have the Pale, which would be good with our Classic American Light or American Lager. The Golden, which is our wheat one, which goes good with our Bavarian Weissbier. We also do a Robust and a Smooth. Those go well with the darker styles of beer, like an Oktoberfest Lager or our St. Patrick’s Irish Stout. You'll use a Smooth if you want something more malty and the Robust to bring out some great roasted malt character.

The difference between the two, the booster is simply just for increasing your alcohol content. It's a not really going to add much to your beer good or bad. I think there's a stigma out there that sometimes adding extra for fermentables like a boosters can create off flavors but with how the booster is formulated It will not do that. It will just help get you to that higher alcohol content, which I think is really good.

The LME is going to be mostly for flavor but will also increase your ABV. So if you're looking to get more flavor out of your beer, I'd recommend using the LME. If you're looking just to get more ABV out the standard cans, then I would recommend adding more booster to your batch.

That’s why we do the Booster with the Standard Refills and then our Deluxe Refills come with the LME cause they're going to have more flavor than just the Standard Refills. We’re trying to keep these pretty short and not go on for too long. So that was kind of our topic for today. We are going to open it up to a Q&A session. If anybody has any questions about the topics that we talked about or about Mr Beer in general, we can go ahead and answer those for you in the live Facebook chat here, if not, then we will wrap it up and save you guys some time, so you can enjoy your Friday and drink some beer.

Well we're getting close to a10 minutes here. We're going to try and keep these between about 10 and 15 minutes on a regular basis. We will be doing these on a weekly basis, so we will try and provide a better time of when we will actually be doing these videos so you guys can plan ahead or make sure you watch or subscribe to our channel, so you get notified when they come up. Don't forget to join our Facebook group, there is a lot of information about Mr. Beer in there and some behind the scenes stuff that go on. We do take requests for future episode topics in the group. If you have an idea that you think we should talk about and you would like to let us know, join the Facebook group and I'm in there and there's Ashley and Zach as well. So that'll be good. That’s it. So, we will see you guys next time, Cheers.