Forgive me in advance for all of the noob/dumb questions. I am getting ready to brew my 3rd batch soon and decided on The Plinian Legacy. My questions are mainly regarding water volumes. I have the 8gal Megapot and 6.5gal big mouth bubbler. This kit says that it is a 6gal batch size, to boil 2.5gal and then top with another 2gal. I assume that them saying this is a 6gal kit that means that I need to get the carboy filled to the 6gal mark instead of the 5 like normal? With boil loss wouldn’t I need to almost 4 gallons added to the wort? That seems like a lot of added water. I only ask this because my other batches called for a full boil and I only had to add a small amount of water to get it to the 5gal mark.
I just wanted to check with others that have experience with this. Thanks in advance!
Welcome new brewer!
Volume is everything… I suspect the total they are telling you is because there will be a larger amount of trub left behind, thus, volume loss…
Its been so long since doing extract brews, so I’ve read stuff that suggests to not boil the extract as long… It’ll darken the wort… Instead, boil the water and hops… add the wort in the last 15 minutes…
Adding water AFTER boiling should cool the wort faster than… sink and ice cubes?
City water?
Sneezles61
Yeah I figured most veterans would be doing All grain and not have any recent experience with extract. My first batch had me do a full 5gal boil, the 2nd had me do a 2.5gal partial boil and top off to 5gal. This one is just confusing with the 2.5partial, 6gal batch.
I do have an immersion chiller, so no issues there.
I guess you could do as they say with the volumes, and if you have a hydrometer you could check the gravity before deciding to add additional water or not.
I agree with what @tominboston said. If you can measure the gravity I would top up to 5 gallons, take a sample and check the gravity. The recipe says 1.070. If it is higher then you can top it off more. Make sure to mix it up well before reading. Normally if you follow the instructions the gravity should be very close.
BTW No questions are stupid here. Ask away. We have all been there.
@hd4mark thanks! On one hand I feel like I am probably making it more complicated than it needs to be, but on the other hand I just want to make sure I am doing it right and come out with a good tasting beer.
I just read the instructions. After flame-out the want 2 gal cold water in the fermenter, then you pour the concentrated wort into that, and then top-off to 6.
What they’re doing is a cooling trick; to prevent you from melting a plastic fermenter with piping hot wort.
If you have a bigger kettle and an immersion chiller you can safely ignore that particular step and have more water in the kettle. Or you can save on having to pull out and then clean the IC, and try it their way.
I do this every summer, but I do the AG version. I did do the extract version twice back in 2014 according to my notes before I converted to AG. I would NOT recommend trying to boil 6.5 gallons in an 8 gallon kettle. The recipe is formulated for a 6 gallon batch due to the amount of hops that will absorb extra beer. When I do a full boil for this, it nearly maxes out my 10 gallon kettle and can be touchy for the hot break phase to not get a boil over. It’s a 90 minute boil for both versions (AG and extract) so you can figure roughly 1.5 gallons loss due to evaporation, depending on how hard you boil. I would personally say that if you were trying to bump up the boil volume, I would go for like 5 - 5.5 gallons max in an 8 gal kettle.
I can personally account for the massive loss on this recipe due to absorption, so I would say you want to get as close to 6 gallons final volume as you can. I have a 6.5 gallon carboy I use for this and it just barely holds it with a blowoff tube. As others have mentioned, you want to get close to 1.070 so you can tinker with volume based on that.
The 100 degrees will come down when you mix with the 2 gallons of cold water for your top off volume as @jmck said, it’s a cooling trick. I chill this down to around 68 before pitching yeast, in the summer my chiller can’t get that low so I put the carboy in a big plastic bucket and rotate out ice bottles to bring it the rest of the way down.
Also, for your hop stand, I’d recommend give it a nice manual whirlpool with your stirring spoon, then cover it and let it sit. I personally use a pump for hopstands, but it’s not necessary starting out. The easiest way to sanitize your chiller is to put it in the kettle for last 15 mins of boil, so I use aluminum foil to cover the kettle around the tubes as my lid won’t fit on with the immersion chiller in.
I love this beer and brew it every year side by side with Off the Topper. Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll be more than happy to help as best as I can.
I’ve brewed this one ten times now with the most recent one kegged and carbing up…also all grain. Getting the volumes down is tricky with this kit as there are a $hit ton of hops and debris in this, even with the hop shots; the more you do it the better you’ll dial it down. @jmck and @radagast with excellent advice.
@radagast thanks for the insight! This is all good stuff. This gives me a lot to think about. I prefer doing a full boil and like the idea of going with 5.5gal, but wonder if I should play it safe and stick to the recipe and just do the 2.5gal boil and topping off with cold water using the chill trick since this is my first time. Then I don’t have to worry about using my immersion chiller since it would just be in the way of the whirlpool hop stand anyway. Thoughts?
@voodoo_donut just curious, do you use the same yeast every time or do you try others out? If it’s the latter have you noticed a difference in the end result?
I use the US-05 that is the default yeast. …also by far the cheapest. Even better is I keep that yeast in a ‘yeast bank’ and make a quick vitality starter the night before.
Haven’t tried the other listed yeast or strayed from US-05. It’s a clean dependable ale yeast.
But that’s the fun thing about homebrewing, you can try other things if you wish.
When i did. I did full. Volume batch. After i did find out my boil of rate. So ended up with my. 5.5 gallon wort on the end. Do as well 1.5 of your lme. On the end. About. 15 min before end. So your wort not so dark. Mailard effect. They call it
You will still need to chill it regardless. You can also dunk your immersion chiller in sanitizer before putting it into your beer for chilling after your hopstand rather than putting it in for last 15 mins of the boil if you’d like.
@radagast good point! I did find another Pliny clone recipe that I might follow in order to get to a full boil. I will still follow the NB recipe in regards to addition times. Going to be difficult for me to merge both recipes, but I think if I write it all out ahead of time I should be good.
