Brewing all 5 gallons?

If I go to a bigger pot and can brew all 5 gallons, but the kit says to brew 2 gallons and add top off water in the fermenter, is it going to make a difference, or should I look for kits/recipes that require full brewing? Was that confusing?

It's just 2 ways to skin a cat. The method is up to you.

However, with a full boil you will need a wort chiller or a lot of patience to wait for the wort to cool down before pitching yeast.

you'll get a better beer in the end if you can boil the entire batch. the hops and malt will be able to 'interact' with all the water and produce a better wort than 2 gallons of wort and then diluting it with 3 gallons of water.

and of course, more volume of boiling hot wort does mean you need to be cautious and patient with the cooldown. a wort chiller or a series of cold baths is pretty much mandatory if you want a good cold break to precipitate some undesirables to the bottom of your pot.

Thanks for the responses, I realize about the chiller. I had found a nice 9 gal kettle and chiller on www.morebeer.com I was going to buy together.

You will also probably want to decrease the amount of hops you add. As the boil is less concentrated when boiling all 5 gallons you will get better utilization. Any brewing software can help you with this.

Anyone have a good link to a brew calc for this? Thanks!

Lonek said:

Anyone have a good link to a brew calc for this? Thanks!

Click to expand...

If in the meantime you want to see a conversion, post your current recipe and details (IBU's , SRM, etc) and I can run it through beersmith for you.

www.beersmith.com is where you can get a trial version of the software.

Or go to:

http://beertools.com/html/recipes.php and register to access an online recipe generator.

Lonek said:

Anyone have a good link to a brew calc for this? Thanks!

Click to expand...

pretty much all of the software packages will do this. I use promash and there's a place where you can input batch volume & boil volume. It calculates it from that and gives you the IBUs. For example, I do 5g batches but only boil 3g. I'm still waiting to see if BeerToolsPro will have support for late extract additions.