2 boils

I have a 5 gallon pot for my extract brewing, and I found another 3 or 4 gallon pot that we had stashed away.
My question is has anyone ever tried boiling two pots and then adding them to the carboy? I was thinking of doing the hop boil in the bigger pot to get better utilization 4 gallons in the big pot with just the water and the hops, and then in the smaller pot boiling the extract for 15 or 20 minutes to sanitize and then combining them in the carboy. Has anyone ever tried this??
Or do hops gain something with having them boiled in the extract?

I know that the gravity of the wort will effect hop utilization. I think that as long as you do all you calculations for a SG of 1.000, to get the correct IBU's and what not you should be alright. Sound like a good experiment,

Cheers

wop31 said:

I know that the gravity of the wort will effect hop utilization. I think that as long as you do all you calculations for a SG of 1.000, to get the correct IBU's and what not you should be alright. Sound like a good experiment,

Cheers

Click to expand...

yeah I have not gotten into all the calculations and such yet, I just did my first batch a few weeks ago and it is conditioning in the bottles. I am just going to do a kit agian I think one or two more times before I start getting into the recipes and such

Even so the Kits should come with an ingredients list and you can take that and plug it into any of the brew software out there, and come up with all the numbers. there are a ton of free tools and software on the web, just got to search a bit, most that aren't free offer free trials too.

This is exactly how I do my mini-mashes.

Mini-mash goes into the 4 gallon pot for a full boil with hops. Extract goes into a second pot for a short boil. Works fine for me.

To avoid having to make calculations to compensate for hop utilization, you are better off mixing your wort and splitting it between the two pots. If the two pots have the same gravity, your hop utilization will be similar to boiling the whole thing in one big pot.

For example, if you are AG brewing, split your first runnings into two pots, and add a proportionally similar amount of second runnings to each pot. For example, if you intend to boil 2 gallons in the small pot and 4 gallons in the larger pot, then use a 1:2 ratio to split the first and second runnings.

Or dump it all in a big cooler or bucket, mix it up, and fill your pots from that.