Adding malt at knockout.

I hope this isn't a stupid question but....
My recipe calls for half of LME to be added at knockout.
Is there an advantage to adding malt at knockout, or full boil with all the extract. I don't really understand the purpose of adding half the malt at knockout.

Yes, there are a couple of huge advantages. The main one is less of a "cooked extract" taste in the finished beer, and of course the beer color will remain lighter. There will be less maillard reactions in the wort. It generally makes a better tasting beer.

Search "late extract addition" here on the forum for more!

I appreciate your knowledge. Another rookie question, if I may. I have scaled the recipe down to 3 gal from 5. Will that make any difference to the prepation and steps involved in brewing this? Excepting, of course, the amounts.

bwgolling said:

I appreciate your knowledge. Another rookie question, if I may. I have scaled the recipe down to 3 gal from 5. Will that make any difference to the prepation and steps involved in brewing this? Excepting, of course, the amounts.

Click to expand...

No, it should be fine. Recipes scale very easily!

A few things will likely change, depending on your equipment.

One change that may have escaped your attention (it certainly did mine the first few times) is that if you're decreasing the amount of top-off water, your hop utilization will increase. This means a more bitter beer if you just take the amount of hops you're currently using and multiply by 3/5.

Of course, good brewing software will account for this, which brings up an important question: How are you scaling your recipe? Excel? BeerSmith?

I used Brewersfriend.com. They have a recipe scaler. But I read somewhere that you could use this formula to scale a recipe.
Orig Amt * New Amt / Orig Amt.

Never used brewersfriend.com before, but had a look and it does account for changes to hop utilization if you scale recipes. So, that's cool!

I found that you have to make sure to enter the correct boil size after hitting the scale button, since it adjusts your boil size as well as your ingredients.

Have you ever tried hopville.com? It's another free web-based piece of software with a slightly different interface. I've used it a bit and like it. Something to try.