Full boil with extract kit question

[Pelican521]

I was in my LBS Friday, and we were talking about doing full boils vs partials. I picked up an extract kit and told him I was thinking of doing a full boil on it. His response was that in order to do a full boil they would have to reformulate the ingredients (mostly the amount of hops) a bit to compensate for a full boil.

Granted it was a clone kit, but does that sound right?

 

[Adaman05]

Yes, you'll get better hop utilization with the full boil. You may want to reduce your bittering hop some. What's the recipe, and what beer are you cloning? I recently brewed a Fuller's London Porter recipe that was intended as a partial boil, but I ended up doing a full boil and didn't scale back the hops. It ended up a touch more bitter than the real thing, but I ended up preferring my beer to Fuller's.

 

[aiptasia]

Depending on the differences in water volume, yes. Full boil assumes you're boiling the total volume of the wort in the pot in one go. Most kits are partial boil which is more manageable for stove top brewing. Adding 3 gallons of water to a 5 gallon pot and then topping off the additional water volume in the primary fermenter is the usual method.

To see the difference in grain bill and hops schedule amounts, i'd suggest using a program like beersmith. It will allow you to enter in the amounts from your kit using a partial boil equipment setup and then allow you to switch brewing profiles to a full boil sized pot, and will adjust the amounts you need automatically.

 

[sherma]

By "partial boil" do you mean less than a 60 minute boil? If so, then yes, he is right. The longer you boil hops, the more hop oil isomerizes, meaning it turns into the bitterness you perceive in beer, which drives up the IBUs. You don't need to boil for 60 minutes with an extract kit. The extract has already been boiled.

 

[GenIke]

Partial boil = boiling with 2-3 gallons and topping off with plain water to equal 5 gallons.

Full boil = boiling 6 gallons down to 5 gallons

 

[Pelican521]

Its a clone of Racer 5 IPA. And yes, it was the buttering hop he said that would need to scale back now that i think about it. You never know what sort of info you get, so I wanted to make sure what he said was accurate and this IPA I'm doing, it will have plenty of bitterness so I didn't want to mess it up.

Meevo, a partial boil is when u boil approx 2.5 gal in a 5 gal a extract kit.

Thx guys.

 

[Cyclman]

I never complain when my beer is too hoppy!