Standard Dilution Practice

Quick question, if you have a recipe that tells you not to pull more than say 6.25 gallons from the mash after all is said and sparged, if you need to start with 8 gallons because you have a wide a** kettle and an evaporation rate over 18% and you need 90 minutes. Do you add water to get to your 8 gallons or just disregard the warning and pull all 8 from the sparge? If you add water, it doesn't really matter right? You will boil down to 5.25 and still get the OG your after right?

Thanks!

you'll have better hops utilization with all that water. you'll have to adjust your hop schedules accordingly. as far as the gravity question, I think you're right. you have the same PPG and same end volume.

If you're batch sparging, it'd be hard to oversparge unless you had a very small grain bill.

If you top up with water, you'd be reducing the OG significantly. I guess I'd have to see a situation where I would need such a large amount of wort and a very small grain bill before I could give advice, I guess.

YooperBrew said:

If you're batch sparging, it'd be hard to oversparge unless you had a very small grain bill.

If you top up with water, you'd be reducing the OG significantly. I guess I'd have to see a situation where I would need such a large amount of wort and a very small grain bill before I could give advice, I guess.

Click to expand...

It's the AHS Pliny the Elder Clone... 17oz of hops and 11.5# grainbill including 2 row, carapils and crystal 10... OG 1.074

His instruction sheet says not to pull more than 6.25 gallons out of the mash but if I boil 6.25 gallons for 90 min I will have about 3 gallons left I want to put in around 7.5-8 gallons, whatever beersmith calculates... the question is do I add water to get there or just batch sparge to there... I'd rather batch sparge to there..

Thanks!