AHS commerical brew kits observations and questions

I have been brewing for a while, mostly brews that I have found on the interwebs, or recipes that I have generated myself with BeerSmith. My wife decided that she would get me some kits of her favorite brews to work from. She ordered me a DFH 90 min. IPA and a Lagunitas IPA kit.
I was surprised to find how little hops go into the DFH 90 min. I know it's a malty IPA but 6 oz. is as much as I put into a Pale Ale. The Lagunitas IPA came without any dry hops, again going against all I know on IPA brewing.
My questions... both kits recommend a 2.5 gallon boil. I have a 40 qt. brew pot and would prefer to do a full boil. Would the hops/malt be affected by a full boil?
Also I have read heavily about late boil additions of your extract, I would like to go that way but I don't know how much that will mess up the clone. Any beer is good to me, But my wife is hoping for decent representations of her favorite brews. So is it a good idea to tweak established brew kits to maximize flavors or just follow them to the letter?
Also I would love any input from y'all fellow brewers that have used these kits.
TIA,
Dave

If you do a full boil you're going to screw up the hop utilization. The recipes from AHS are designed to clone the beer as a partial boil.

Yes, you can do it, but it will come out less hoppy that way.

Really, I have read that a full boil with a late extract addition will optimize the hop profile.
I can see your point about messing up the developed recipe, and that was the point of my thread. Will it mess it up, will it add to it (but change the flavor away from the clone), or is it nothing to worry about....hop utilization and full wort boils are just hype

full boil >>> partial boil (IMO)

Check out some brewing software (there are stickies, take your pick) and compare the hop utilization changes. You might have to back off on the 60 minute addition to compensate, but you might not. The advantages of the full boil out weigh the 10 minutes of work it will take to do the math.

Both late addition and going to a full boil will increase the IBUs without changing the hop flavor/aroma. Based on my experiences with Austin's clones, their recipes are very, very good. Where I've been able to do side-by-side comparisons, they have been spot on. Don't mess with it.

david_42 said:

Both late addition and going to a full boil will increase the IBUs without changing the hop flavor/aroma. Based on my experiences with Austin's clones, their recipes are very, very good. Where I've been able to do side-by-side comparisons, they have been spot on. Don't mess with it.

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I would agree except for their alcohol boost. In terms of OG, FG and taste, the two batches I've done with their straight up extract kit have been right on the money. The two I tried the boost on were drinkable but way off target.

Lagunitus IPA is clearly dry hopped so I would say not dry hopping is going to make for a poor clone. Maybe the objective is to clone an old bottle of it.

I did my PtE clone from them as a full boil. It is glorious and I'm down to a six pack or so.

Spaceball1 said:

I would agree except for their alcohol boost. In terms of OG, FG and taste, the two batches I've done with their straight up extract kit have been right on the money. The two I tried the boost on were drinkable but way off target.

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I've done the boost on several of my kits from AHS. In my experience, the lower the OG or final ABV is supposed to be, the more noticeable and unappealing the boost will be. I think I'm done doing it on my beers < 1.060. I may be done trying it for good, especially on clone kits, as the point of those kits are to get as close to the commercial brew as possible, and the boost is counter-intuitive to that purpose.

Don't know about the boost, I've never used it. I figure I'm looking for a clone, I want it as designed.

I can only speak to AHS's Pliny the Elder extract kit, but they follow same hop amounts and schedule as the all grain Pliny the Bastid recipe. This made me wonder if their extract recipes are really optimized for partial boil. I don't have a pot big enough for a full boil, so I did the best I could. I have a 20 qt. pot and started with 3.5 gal of water. When I added the 9# of LME, it probably brought the boil up to 4.5 gal! That's too much for a 5 gallon pot but I managed to avoid any boilovers. (phew!)

I probably lost about a gallon to evaporation over the 90 minute boil time and another gallon to all the hop mass. So I still had to top off my fermenter with 2.5 gallons of water. Based on this it sounds like ~6.5-7 gallons is needed for a full boil of PtE.

Regarding late extract additions, what I have read is you want your partial boil gravity to be the same as your full boil gravity. For example, if your 5 gallon gravity into your fermenter after topping off is 1.050 then you want your boil gravity to be 1.050 for accurate hop utilization. If you have a total of 6lbs of extract and you're boiling half the amount of liquid then you want to add 3lbs at the start of boil and the rest at flameout or close to flameout.

Hop utilization depends on how the recipe was formulated. Typically, retailers aren't going to optimize the hops for a highly concentrated extract partial boil because that means they would need to include more hops. Most kits I've seen have hop schedules for partial boils, but they don't instruct you to only add half the extract, which throws the hop utilization off slightly.

So there are two things you need to do 1) make sure the kit assumes a partial boil for the hop additions and 2) only add half the extract for the boil if the recipe is based on a partial boil. Add the rest of the extract at the end of the boil.

NorCalAngler said:

Regarding late extract additions, what I have read is you want your partial boil gravity to be the same as your full boil gravity. For example, if your 5 gallon gravity into your fermenter after topping off is 1.050 then you want your boil gravity to be 1.050 for accurate hop utilization. If you have a total of 6lbs of extract and you're boiling half the amount of liquid then you want to add 3lbs at the start of boil and the rest at flameout or close to flameout.

Hop utilization depends on how the recipe was formulated. Typically, retailers aren't going to optimize the hops for a highly concentrated extract partial boil because that means they would need to include more hops. Most kits I've seen have hop schedules for partial boils, but they don't instruct you to only add half the extract, which throws the hop utilization off slightly.

So there are two things you need to do 1) make sure the kit assumes a partial boil for the hop additions and 2) only add half the extract for the boil if the recipe is based on a partial boil. Add the rest of the extract at the end of the boil.

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Thanks for this explanation. This could explain why my American IPA from BB (first brew) did not have much hop presence at all. I brewed it (partial-2.5 gal) will a full LME addition at beginning of boil. I'd be curious to see the difference in waiting to add the second can at the end of boil. Maybe I will try that recipe again after my AHS Double IPA I have planned for this weekend