Despite owning the domain registration Dave's Beer.com, I'm not a fanatic brewer. Dave's Beer embodies the spirit in which I would like to live. Kicked back, relaxed, sharing food and spirits with friends. I'm a tad type A to fully realize that dream. Something to work on.
I do love to brew though. With parenting and work, brewing gets low priority. In addition to celebrating food, I also have a passion for process development. Not quite an idea man, I don't invent many things, but I see opportunity for improvement on underdeveloped good ideas.
If you Google no boil ale, the #1 search result is a 2001 piece from a periodical called BYO (brew your own). Kind of interesting but not a popular concept. Boiling the wort (beer before it's fermented) takes a long time and I don't know how important it is since I do only malt extract brews with some specialty grains infused.
A couple weeks ago, I put this method to the test. I infused some chocolate malt (1/2 lb.) and 120 crystal malt (1 lb.) in 140-deg-F water for an hour. This mini mash was filtered and added to 6 lbs. Breiss Gold dry malt extract and about 2 ounces of Fuggles hops and a couple teaspoons of gypsum and dissolved in water that was about 140-deg-F. The mixture was stirred vigorously and a Nottingham yeast culture was added once the mixture cooled to about 75-deg-F. I aerated it vigorously and let it ferment for about a week. My basement was approximately 60 +/-10 degrees (we lost heat for a day during that period), but the fermentation kept going along, ending the primary at 1.015 F.G. (O.G. 1.060). Should be a nice copper colored brown ale about 6% alcohol by volume. The sample so far is better than any recent batch. And, much easier brew! We'll see after a brief secondary and bottling/kegging for the final test.
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