I have been going to my local Brewstock store and getting recipes for 3 gallon batches. I have a 4 gallon brew pot, gas stove and am able to do all my brewing inside in the air conditioning.
Question is how much water to start off the boil with in the brewpot.
Should I start with 3 gallons and then top off the fermenter to 3 gallons after evaporation....Or....start with 1.5 -2 gallons then top off fermenter to 3 gallons?
These recipes are LME, Hops and steeping grains. Are there any "quality benefits" in brewing with more or less water that affects the hop, LME, etc...flavoring ?
If you're not doing a full volume boil, you should probably consider using only some of the extract for the boil and adding the rest at flameout. There are a couple of reasons for this. If the wort you use for the boil is too thick, you don't get good hop utilization. You also tend to get more caramelization of the extract (I think this is especially true of LME, but may also be true of DME), so the resulting beer will be darker than you probably intended and may be less fermentable, as well.
Thanks...I guess I will start with 3 gallons.
Reason I was asking is a Brewing Step by Step sheet show 2.5 gallons in the brewpot for a 5 gallon batch.
Yeah, you certainly *can* brew a 5-gallon batch only using 2.5G of water in the kettle. You just have to account for thins like bpgreen mentioned:
- Darkening of wort
- Carmelization (possible)
- Hop utilization. As your gravity goes up, hop utilization goes down. Meaning, if you boil 1/2 oz of hopsin a 5 gallons of 1.030 wort you'll get better utilization than boiling that same 1/2oz in 2.5g of 1.060 wort. Again, this is fine if you know how to account for that.
A number of brewers here (mahani being the first that comes to mind) do partial boils and top off with water.
The reason I would do the partial boil and top off is cooling efficiency. If you can brew a 3 gallon batch and end up with 2 gallons in the pot, you can just let it sit on the stove (on a cool part, not the hot burner) with the lid on for about 30 or 40 minutes or so (do a hop stand while your at it) which will get it down to about 130 or so, and then if you happened to have stuck a 1 gallon jug of water in the freezer about 2 hours before hand you have a jug of water with ice crystals just starting to form, IE ~32 degree water. You can dump that water right in, and then have cooled your batch all the way to reasonable pitching temps.
I mainly did it to minimize exposure to my air during cooling (house Brett problems).
It works perfectly fine, especially if you are adding a bunch of the extract in the last 10 minutes of your boil. Just put enough extract in up front to give you the "intended" recipe boil gravity at full volume and all the rest in the last 10 minutes. That will make your bittering hops work "right".
You can also, if you like hoppy (flavor/aroma) APA/IPA type of beers, just put all the extract in with water to make the 2 gallons, bring it to a boil for 5 minutes or so, kill the heat, throw a couple oz of high AA hops with the flavor/aroma you like (citra, simcoe, what not) in, put a lid on it, walk away for 30-40 minutes, and then top up with water. So you basically spent 5 minutes in front of the stove and you have beer.
That works great believe it or not. You aren't "cloning" anything doing that obviously, your just making your own personal APA or IPA like beer. You can get plenty of bitterness from a couple oz or more of high AA hops and a hop stand at flameout temps. Putting a lid on the pot immediately keeps the aroma compounds from blowing off, they condense back into the wort as it cools (like perfume distillation except it's stuck in the pot).
I've done stupidly concentrated batches to make 5 gallon batches in a 12Q pot in the past with good results too believe it or not. I posted a thread somewhere describing it. You have to account for crazy high gravity in hop utilization calculations, but it works. You can't try to clone anything like that, but if you just want to make your own tasty beer unlike any other, it can be done.
Extract - if you are doing an extract build, the topoff method works well and is necessary due to the concentration of the extract.
All-Grain - if you are NOT using extract, I suggest using more water during all stages (Mash Tun + Boil) rather than less water, and approach the full target amount that will be going into your fermentor at the end of the boil. Add water as it boils to make sure you hit target (if you need to).
My brew buddy Aletheia said it best: "Oh I see! At the end here, we have the full solid amount of 5 gallons of wort; it's saturated with the grain goodness, and there is no need to top off with H2O!"
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