Cooling water to wort

Hi. I'm pretty new to all grain brewing. I've pretty much only done extract brewing, and to all my extract brews the directions always say to add x gal of water after boiling the wort to get to your final volume and to cool the wort.

Am I supposed to do this with all grain brewing too? Or am I just supposed to collect the 5gal of wort from the mash and sparge and boil all of that?

Thanks for your help!

You usually get about 6.5 gallons and boil it down to 5. You dont add water after the boil.

All grain brewing is a little trickier. You should know what your pre-boil volume needs to be, and you should be able to calculate what your pre-boil gravity should be. With these 2 numbers in hand, after the mash you should know that you want 6.5 gallons of 1.045 wort and that after the boil, you will have 5.5 gallons of say 1.052 wort (not exact). Sometimes, you need to add water or DME pre-boil to get the right numbers or even add some water post-boil...or just accept that your beer is going to be a little stronger.

Doing full boils, you should probably invest in a wort chiller. Immersion, plate, counterflow options available. You probably want a 50' for the immersion and this can be DIYed fairly easily for around $50.