Newbie here, I am sure this question has been asked a thousand times but I could not find the answer in the forum, sorry for the redundancy. My new brewing kit is in the mail, I ordered a 5 gallon extract starter kit. What size kettle will i need to boil the wort, 4Gallon? 5Gallon? Thanks
A 5 gall would be good for a partial boil. If you want to do full boils, you need a pot substantially larger than batch size. If you keep with brewing, you will eventually want to do full boils. If you can get a larger pot you probably should. My first pot was a 9 gallon and it isn’t oversized for 5 gallon batches, but you could probably do a full boil 5 gallon batch in a 7 gallon pot comfortably.
The search function is a little sub standard.
Best: a 8+ gallon pot. This way you can do a full volume boil. Starting with 6-6.5 gallons and ending with 5-5.25 at the end of 1 hour. Difficult to do with standard stove tops. Best to have a turkey fryer. Also need a way to cool it down, wort chiller.
Minimum: Largest size you can reach a good boil in on your stove top. ~4 gallons. Use what we call “late extract addition”. Only add 1/2 of the extract to the boil kettle in the beginning. At the end of the boil add the remainder. This reduces the carmalizing of the sugars.
The wort will foam up when it gets close to boiling. So leave 3-4" of space in the pot. Have a spray bottle of water handy to knock the foam down. And don’t have the stove on full heat.
Put some water in the refrigerator the night before to add to the fermenter to get the wort temps down before adding the yeast.
If you don’t have a book on order, read the online version of How to Brew
http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html+1 on the turkey fryer with a 7.5 gal pot. I wish i had done that to start. Cheers
Thank you all for your responses. I think I have an old lobster kettle in the basement that should cover this.
