linusstick

Recipes 

After reading that thread from earlier, I'm curious as to how you would go about doing a full boil on an extract beer. I've done a few all grain beers so I'm assuming you just add enough water to get about 6 gallons of wort and boil for an hour (losing about a gallon in the process). What I don't get if this is the case is how the hop utilization remains intact since you are boiling the same amount of hops in almost double the liquid? Maybe (probably) I'm way off here?

smagee

Recipes 

It's a lot easier to calculate the water requirements when using brewing software of some sort; I have to manually tell Beersmith that I'm *not* doing a full boil most of the time.

Hop utilization can be tweaked by shifting the timing of the extract additions, if nothing else. I'm curious how you get the impression that doing a full-boil with extract would be a greater amount of liquid than doing one with all-grain. Full-boil is full-boil; you're using the same amount of liquid whether it's all-grain or extract.

emit31

Recipes 

glad you brought up this question. i have asked this many times at my local home brew ship, but never get a good answer.

dunnright00

Recipes 

What is the purpose of doing a full boil with an extract recipe?

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smagee

Recipes 

I can think of a number of reasons:
1) It's easier to get extract to dissolve with more liquid.
2) It makes hop utilization calculations simpler.
3) No requirement to sanitize topoff liquid.
4) Beersmith always seems to assume it's a full-boil, so when I forget to tell it otherwise, my process gets screwed .

Malticulous

Recipes 

You may not want to steep grain in the full boil volume. pH could be a problem.

You should always run anything you make trough a calculator. It will help you understand and gauge your system. You'll be able to put numbers to a resulting brews, IBU snd SRM. After some practice you will be able to make adjustments prior to brewing that make beer more the way you want it.

wyzazz

Recipes 

I almost always steep with 4 gallons or more when I'm doing an extract recipe.

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Seven

Recipes 

Most extract recipes tell you to do a partial boil then top-up later with cool water. So their hop schedule is calculated with a partial boil in mind.

When doing full boils hop utilization will increase. Some people compensate by reducing the bittering hops by 10 to 15 percent when doing a full boil. Leave the flavor/aroma hops the same.

When I brewed extract batches doing full boils I would move the 10 to 15 percent of hops removed from the bittering addition and add them to the aroma addition.

rege

Recipes 

I tried steeping grains in full 5 gallons. I had an astringency problem, that's the only cause I could trace it to.

Wyrmwood

Recipes 

Brewtarget has custom equipment setups or you can use one of the two default extract setups, one for full boil (5 gal) and one for partial boil (2.5 gal).

I've never sanitized top up water. In fact, I rinse everything I sanitize because I don't like the taste of the sanitizer or the deposits it leaves on my bottles. Then again, we have pretty decent tap water here.

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