Extract water volumes

[Tiredboy]

Am going to start my second brew today. First was AHS Christmas beer, the second will be Irish red (both with steeping grains). A couple of questions:

Can I just use the instructions from the first for temperatures/volumes etc. substituting the different extracts, grains and hops?

The instructions say steep in 2 gallons, make up to 3 gallons before adding DME then make up to 5 gallons in the fermenting bucket. Apart from the final volume how important are the volumes for steeping and boiling (ie if I am 0.25 gallons out at the early stages) or will it make a big difference to the final beer if I don't measure water exactly?

 

[dezman]

I dont think the steeping volume matters very much. The volume for the boil however does somewhat matter. The reason it does is because of hop utilization or the amount of bitternees that will be extracted. In higher SG worts (lower volume) the hop utlization will be less and the opposite for more volume. That being said it'll take more hops in a smaller volume than a larger volume to achive the same bitterness. Other than that as long as you end up with 5 into the fermenter it wont matter.

 

[unionrdr]

I've found that my 2.5-3 gallon boil with 1.5-2lbs of DME gets good utilization. Lighter wort gets more utilization than heavier worts ime. We've steeped in 2 gallons of water with good results.