Beginner extract question concerning wort concentration

[StusBrews]

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new to home brewing, I've done one kit before and today I boiled my second kit (st peter's ruby red). I'm looking into going into extract brewing so thought I'd get some practice today. I read that you need to boil your extract generally in a 50% concentration of water. So I have a 15L stockpot and tried to boil 10L of water to use for my boil. However the stove didn't provide enough heat so I had to remove a bit of water down to about 7L. I eventually got that to the boil, however when I removed it from the heat to stir in the malt extract and then put back onto heat it never reached boiling point again. While I did get a layer of film on the top which I hope is the hot break I never got a rolling boil. I decided to add the hop extract after about 15 mins of this and then 15 mins later removed from heat, topped up to 23L with cold water etc...

For the future would I be ok doing a wort with only about 5L of water for a 23L recipe? I've heard I'd have to change the hop concentration but otherwise would that be ok or is that too low volume?
I've googled around for hours now and not found anyone doing less than about 8L in the wort, so any help is much appreciated.

Cheers,
Stu

[Halyard]

We now know that the concentration of the wort doesn't really matter that much in terms of hop utilisation. See this thread and study it: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=42263 The action starts a few replies down when Graham Wheeler himself gets on and overturns conventional thought.

Still, I seem to like have a bit of water to work with, but my hob boils 11.5 litres just fine, so I base what I do on that. I'll assume now that you can get away with 5 litres if you are not going very bitter.

Halyard

[StusBrews]

Thanks for that link, very useful reading. I feel confident enough to try a 5L partial boil now. I'm still a bit unclear on the hops utilisation though. Say I had a recipe for a 10L partial boil, I'd use the same amount of malt and steeping grains, however would I need to adjust the amount of hops?