Two good batches, more questions

Well, I'm happy to say that with some good advice from this forum, I now have two quite good batches of Snow Cap Ale clone under my belt

The last batch, I finally got my hop straining nightmare kicked to the curb. The bazooka screen works awesome. I shot for 6 gallons, which I almost nailed at the end of the boil. It was just shy. I wound up with only 5 gallons in the fermenter, so apparently 3.75 ounces of hops soaks up a lot of wort.

I wound up pouring some (boiled) water into the boiler and essentially sparging the hops, and I got a fairly strong wort back out of the kettle. So I'm at about 5.75 gallons in the fermenter now and around 74 OG.

So the questions of the day are...

When you hop without bags, are you doing anything fancy to "wring" the wort out of the hops?

When a recipe targets 5 gallons, is that in the keg, at the start of fermentation, or in the boiler with all the hops still in, or what?

First question: I'll pass, since I have only used pellets, not whole.

Second question: the batch size quoted in the recipe is for what goes in to the fermenter. This inevitably means that less will go into the keg (or bottles). I calculate my intended OG for a 5.5 gallon batch, hoping to get 5 gallons of beer at the end. If the recipe calls for 5 gal, I scale it up.

I don't filter my hops. Everything goes into the fermenter. Because of this and additional crud in the form of cold and hot break material, I will usually shoot for at least 5.5G in the fermenter for a 5G batch.

I leave hops and as much break (my trub cone seems to be just hops...) as I can in the kettle, usually almost a gallon. I'm not very concerned with squeezing out as much finished beer as I can from a batch, in fact I've been doing a few 4-gallon batches in a 5-gallon carboy -- partly just to fill the open fermenter, partly because I'm deathly afraid of overfilling a keg!

If a recipe's target volume is something other than the finished beer volume, it should tell you that - on the Jamil Show, JZ always says his recipes are for 6 gallons at the end of boil. You will probably find that you have to tweak some things in your process (like compensating for wort absorption when using whole hops) to get your volumes right on. Use brewing software and plug in as much good data as you can.