Cold steeping - adding early or late to boil?

I've been reading all I can on cold steeping both here and elsewhere. Some places indicate that the cold steeped liquid should be added late in the boil, others say it doesn't matter, just add it to the kettle before boiling.

So, does anyone have any experience with this? It would be easiest to add up front, but if it makes a difference I'll add late and deal with the interrupted boil and break that results.

Will be a gallon + for 2.25 pounds of dark grains (chocolate, choc. wheat, black patent, roasted barley) for a CDA.

Thanks!

My guess would be that it wouldn't matter all that much either way.

Yea, it doesn't really matter, you just want to get the liquid in the brew pot without going through the mash. You could even boil separately and mix it in the primary. You just have to sterilize it.

When I brewed a cold steeped CDA I steeped them in my mash tun with the dark grains in a bag. After 24 hrs I removed the bag of grains, gave it a rinse and squeeze then simply added the balance of my strike water and mashed the light grains as normal.

I know this goes against a lot of the advise on here but based on an interview with the brewers at Deschutes, this is their process (and they make one of my favorite CDA's) so I emulated them. My version is dry hopping now but the samples I've had were amazing!

FWIW~

I made a CDA the other day and, like you, read all I could on the cold steeping procedure.

I ended up upping the the amount of dark grains by about 5%, so I put my 30oz of dark grains in two grain bags, put them in a sterilized bucket, added 1 gallon of 80F water and let it steep over night, for a total of about 18 hours, swirling sporadically. My room temperature is about 65Fish. I removed the grain bags, and sparged with 1 gal of water at 80F for a total yield of 1.9 gallons. I added this wort to my boil with 10 minutes left. I brought the wort back up to a boil and boiled for 10 more min. I had 4.5gals of wort total then.

The only thing I forgot to compensate for was the reduced hop utilization rate due to the increased wort density prior to adding my dark wort (I boiled 3gal of wort for 50 min yet my total IBU's were calculated on a 4 gal average.)

The color is dark.....I wouldn't say black or even porter like....but it does smell divine!!! I used WLP007 instead of 002 to help get my FG down a little too. Hope this helps!!