Can you boil double hops and extract then water down

[simon12]

As per title can you do a boil with double the extract and hops the recipe requires then just add water to double the quantity and is there any down side to it? If its OK could you even quadruple the boil volume?

[rootsbrew]

Apologies for needing to check the question: for example - if a recipe says 3kg LME + 50g hops in 25 litres, you would boil 6kg LME + 100g hops in 25 litres?

Unless I'm much mistaken, this is similar to (using the same recipe) boiling 3kg LME + 50 hops in 12.5 litres. So, yes you "can". But will the beer be what the recipe-writer intended... Perhaps others are better placed than me to provide a good answer to that.

[Rookie]

It's called high gravity brewing and a lot of small breweries do it to increase capacity without having to buy larger equipment. I recently did a pilsner that way (three gallons to five) that turned out good. I'm not sure how quadrupling would turn out; only one way to find out, good luck.

[Wonkydonkey]

At some point the hop utilisation would drop, as there's to much sugar in the said volume of beer. Unless you boil the hops separate.

[BenB]

And dead spaces can have quite an impact unless you water down in the boiler rather than the f.v.

[Clibit]

I think the best way is to add some of the extract at the,start of the boil and the rest at the end, you don't want a very high gravity boil as this will reduce hop utilisation. Aim maybe for a boil gravity of 1040 ish.

[simon12]

Sorry, the replies on this came a bit late and I forgot about it as I am not normally an extract brewer so rarely look in this part of the forum. Its something I will be trying soon on some level and will post back the results. Thanks for the answers.