First full boil help please! (quick)

Hello everyone,

I've been pretty much lurking here for the past month, long enough for me to get the bug, buy a starter kit and start brewing. I have an amber a week from bottling that I bought from More Beer. I also bought a Blond Ale kit for the second go which is going as I type.

From every thing I read a full boil is better than a partial boil, so I stopped by a home brew supply store on my weekend road trip and bought a chiller. Well I just got back from the trip and started the batch. I figured I would lose around a gallon in the reduction so I started with six gallons of water. What I didn't take into consideration is the 7lbs of LME which was around a gallon. So now I'm starting with close to 7 gallons of liquid.

My question is, should I reduce the wort to around 6 gallons before I add the bittering hops, or should I add them now and boil till 5 gallons is achieved? My guess is that I only want to boil them for an hour.

Also, if the recipe calls for 1 oz bittering hops for a partial boil, How much should I add since I am doing a full boil. My goal is to have an easy drinking brew for the wifey that isn't too bitter so she is as stoked as me with brewing good beer.

Thanks for such a cool place to hang with a good beer

ok here's the deal. how much bittering you get out of an addition of hops depends on 4 things, how much hops you add, how long you boil them, what their alpha acid content is, and what the specific gravity of your boil is.

i know it is hardly ever mentioned in a recipe but boil gravity is important. the higher the boil gravity the less bitterness you get out of a addition of hops. this can be accounted for by either adding more hops or increasing the boil time. the lower the boil gravity the more bitterness you get from a hop addition. again you can account for this by decreasing the amount of hops or shortening their boil time. its imposable to tell you how much to increase a hop addition without knowing the boil gravity of the original recipe and the boil gravity of the current recipe.

since you added to much water your boil gravity will be lower than intended. so you would want to add less hops. am i right in assuming the instructions are telling you to do a partial boil? if so when you decided to convert to full boil you threw off the bitterness calculations so your not going to get the right amount of bitterness anyway. my suggestion would be to just boil the recipe as normal and chock this up to experience for next time. when it comes time to transfer to the carboy just transfer 5 gallons and leave the rest.

boil it for 90min total. follow your hop additions as you normally would, probably first at 60min..... that should burn off some extra water for you.

Can I not boil an extra amount of time to achieve the correct OG? I with 7 gallons I started at an OG of 1.043? The target is 1.045 to 1.048.

I figured I could reduce till I got the correct OG, The longer the boil (more reduction) The higher the sugar content in the liquid.

Am I wrong?

Arkador said:

boil it for 90min total. follow your hop additions as you normally would, probably first at 60min..... that should burn off some extra water for you.

Click to expand...

That is what I was hoping

TipsyDragon said:

when it comes time to transfer to the carboy just transfer 5 gallons and leave the rest.

Click to expand...

The thought of that just kills me