Brew pots

If a recipe calls for a bigger size of brew pot for a boil if you don't have one that big can't you just use what you have and the wort would be the same once you bring the water level up in the fermenter? I've got a recipe that wants me to use a 6.5 gal pot or bigger.

One difference is that in a full boil all the water has been boiled. Adding unsanitized makeup water after the boil can work (I've done it many time) but exposes the batch to increased likelihood of infection. Another difference is hops utilization. Exposing only part of the wort to the hops can reduce the extraction rate.

chiefsbrew1 said:

If a recipe calls for a bigger size of brew pot for a boil if you don't have one that big can't you just use what you have and the wort would be the same once you bring the water level up in the fermenter? I've got a recipe that wants me to use a 6.5 gal pot or bigger.

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I'm interested in this too. Recently I discovered that I have a lot of trub loss I haven't been accounted for and I don't have much room left to increase my batch size. I'm trying to harvest yeast and want to limit the amount of non-yeast material in my cake. For me, I think I need to design my recipe with top off water, possibly adding one gallon near the end of the boil after about 1 gallon has boiled off.