Higher preboil gravity

[Paul Lowe]

For my brewing I do a single drain from my mash tun. I also have a small kettle and as a consequence my preboil gravity reading is often the same as my finished gravity. To maintain the same gravity i need to top up the kettle with water from time to time to maintain the starting volume. Is this process likely to have any detrimental effect on beer quality?

The general practise seems to be to allow the volume to reduce during the boil to increase gravity.

 

[thehaze]

No sparge? Sparging will help you dilute the wort, getting it at the desired OG, and reaching your volume. Boiling the wort achieves more things, not only reaching your OG. Otherwise, you should mash with a higher water to grain ration and just remove grains, and then boil.

 

[Vale71]

For my brewing I do a single drain from my mash tun. I also have a small kettle and as a consequence my preboil gravity reading is often the same as my finished gravity. To maintain the same gravity i need to top up the kettle with water from time to time to maintain the starting volume. Is this process likely to have any detrimental effect on beer quality?

Besides being a waste of time and possibly stopping the boil for a few minutes then no, but instead you could just do what everyone else does who is limited by the size of his/her equipment, just do your boil and at the end add the right amount of dilution water in a single step, which will also give you a head start on cooling the wort. There is really no point in adding the dilution water through several small additions.

 

[Vale71]

Just realized that with "from time to time" you might have meant "every other batch or so" and not that you actually sit there and add water one cup at the time throughout the boil. If that is the case sorry for the misunderstanding and please disregard my previous post.
As for the disadvantages of high gravity brewing in general the main ones are reduced hop extraction and a stronger darkening of the wort during boiling. The latter won't be much of an issue if you mainly brew Porters and Schwarzbier, more so if extra pale lagers are your favourite style.

 

[Paul Lowe]

Thanks for the response. Its useful and might explain my the characteristics of my favourite APA recipe appear to have changed slightly. My explanation was not that clear/good but I would only have one or two additions of boiling water in the last 15 minutes. I mainly adopted this practise to ensure the water additions were sterilised. Given my chill times are less than 20 minutes and processes and equipment to clean are limited my brewday is relatively short.