BlightyBrewer

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Now that I have a 29L boil kettle, I was thinking that I could boil an extract brew with the full volume of water added, rather than boiling the partial volume and adding cold water at the end to bring the volume up. Is there anything wrong with this suggestion?

I assume that I would need to adjust my hop quantities to suit the boil volume?

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usmcruz

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No. I assume you have a way of cooling the wort down fast? When you do a full hard boil like that you want to create a good hotbreak (coagulation of protiens that form at the bottom of the kettle). Well you would want a good cold break as well. You see you chilled the wort pretty fast before by adding cold water which is a good way of forming a good cold break, but now with no more water to add a counter flow or immersion chiller needs to be implemented. You could always stick it in a bath of ice, but it will take more than a couple of minutes to get down to temp. Cold break is importent because it will lower the production of fusel alcohols (which you dont want) in your brew.

I assume that I would need to adjust my hop quantities to suit the boil volume?[/QUOTE]

Im not sure what your asking. Even when you did your boils before you still should of added the amount of hops you wanted to the boil. If you were only making 2 or 4 gallons before and now you want to do a 5 gallon recipe then yes you would need to adjust your hops. Hope this helps

El Pistolero

Recipes 

I'm in the same boat you are...fixing to start doing full boils, but not quite ready to move up to all grain. I was wondering if I need to adjust the hops too, but from the hop utilization table in Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing, it appears that going from 3 to 6 gallons, the utilization rate isn't going to increase more than 5 to 10 percent at most, so I'm going to leave it alone for now.

That said, in the all-grain recipes in Beer Captured, they suggest cutting the bittering hops back by 22% on average.

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Kaiser

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I'm doing this too, as it will prepare me for all grain.

Besides a chiller, I suggest that you get an oxygenation or aeration system. When you do full wort boils, all the oxygen is gone from the wort and needs to be replaced. I found that simply spashing the wort is not cutting it.

When I did partial boils I would dump in one or 2 galons of supermarked spring water. If you don't boil it, it would provide enough oxygen for a healthy fermentation (any of them are actually enriched with oxygen). The FDA may even reqire that it is sanitary.

Kai

david_42

Recipes 

Most of my early batches were extract full boils. I've used a chiller right from the beginning. You need to reduce the bittering hops a little, but not the aroma or flavor hops. It isn't a big change unless you've been using 2-3 oz. of bittering hops.

I like doing partials for Milds and other low bitterness ales.

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DeRoux's Broux

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an immersion chiller for 5 g will do the trick. or, put a lid on the kettle and put it into an ice bath in a large wash tub. stir the ice in the tub around the kettle often, and add ice if needed. reducing the bittering hops will be required due to the full wort boil. if you use promash, or any other brewing software, you can make those adjustments with ease. i second the aeration of the wort after the full 5 gallon boil. your yeast will appreciate it.

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BlightyBrewer

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A wort chiller (counterflow) is definitely on my radar for must have stuff. Incidently, there's a great counterflow wort chiller project in the Jan / Feb 06 issue of BYO.

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God Emporer BillyBrew

Recipes 

Could you boil 4 gallons and add one gallon of Ice at the end? Wouldn't you have almost the same effect?

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BlightyBrewer

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I've always been a bit wary of using ice to cool. I'm not convinced it would be sanitized.

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Kaiser

Recipes 

I did the math on that, and you actually need 2 gal of ice to bring 212F down to about 80F

Kai