Add all water at boil, or post boil?

I am brewing from a kit (5 gal) and I bought bottled spring water...

Since about 2.5 gallons of water will be used during the boil....does it matter if I add the rest to the boil?...or is it OK to add the balance of the water to wort once it is in the fermenting bucket straight from their gallon jugs?

I understand I need to get the water below 80F to pitch the yeast and figure I can use the cooler water to help bring the temp down as well.....

Is this the proper way?

What is the school of thought on this? and I guess this goes for water in general, whether it be tap or bottled....

the reason for this is: how much room do you have to boil? if you have a small pot, go for 2.5g. the bigger the pot, the more you can boil. the more you boil, the better, and the lighter, it will be

Add half the extract at the start of the boil (3 gallons). Add the remainder of the extract at flameout.

Chill the pot in a sink with ice. Put 2 gallons of water (chill the bottles first) into the carboy. Pour the (partly-chilled but probably still very hot) wort in on top of the cold water. Top it up to 5 gallons.

Pitch yeast when cool. That's how I did it with kits. YMMV.

To be even clearer - the more you can boil at the same time, the better. This can get complicated though because the more volume in the pot (closer to the top of the pot), the more careful you need to be in avoiding a boil over. Additionally, if you don't have a wort chiller and you decide to chill in the pot (I add ice to rapidly chill at the end of the boil) then you have less room to do that. But again, the more you can boil in the pot, the better.

If you're going to top off with water, throw it in the freezer for awhile. especially if you don't have a wort chiller. if you're cooling in a sink with ice, AND using water to top off, you may as well use the water as cold as you can get it to reduce the time it takes to chill that wort.

Thanks everyone for the feedback....

I guess what I was doing is called a "Partial Boil" and thought that was the way to do it...I do have a very large aluminum pot that can handle the five gallons...in the future I will do a full boil and just make/buy a wort chiller...

I have a similar question. You are supposed to cool the wort then pour it into fermenter on top of 2.5 gallons of cold water and pitch yeast once it gets below certain temperature. Adding cold water to the still boiling wort won't hurt anything will it? or should i do the ice batch to 100 degrees then pour into fermenter on top of cold water like instructions call for?

sportscrazed2 said:

I have a similar question. You are supposed to cool the wort then pour it into fermenter on top of 2.5 gallons of cold water and pitch yeast once it gets below certain temperature. Adding cold water to the still boiling wort won't hurt anything will it? or should i do the ice batch to 100 degrees then pour into fermenter on top of cold water like instructions call for?

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You're going to want to chill the boiling wort first, to under 90 degrees and THEN top off with cold water to bring you to 5 gallons and 70 degrees. I'd keep the 2.5 gallons of cold top-up water in a different container, to make sure you don't go over the 5 gallons! mark the carboy at the five gallon level, before you brew. It's really hard to "eyeball" it.

i have a bucket with the 5 gallon mark labeled on the side