I was pondering my lack of brewing the other day and came across an idea. Would it be possible to make a double batch of a single beer, made from extract, from one boil? Buying double the grains, extract and hops; creating essentially a double (for example) pale ale then diluting the wort into two separate five gallon bacthes of brew and fermenting as normal. Basically making 10 gallons of beer by days end, from my regular boil. Outside of any technicalities, hop utilization blah, blah, etc; has anyone done this? And if so, how did it turn out? Or, can anyone tell me why this might not work how I want it to. I’m sure that I’m not the first to think of it. Anyway I have a solid recipe that I like to make, an ordinary bitter using only Cluster hops, and thought I could save time by just diluting the even HIGHER concentrated gravity boil into the two now low gravity pre-fermented beers.
I haven’t done exactly that but have often brewed a higher gravity wort and diluted. Works just fine. For extra safety you might want to preboil your dilution water and let it cool, even chill it ahead of time so when you mix you get some help on getting to pitching temps.
If you’re talking about diluting the already-fermented beer, that works too. I’d worry more about oxidation in going that route.
