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I will soon need to buy some more equipment, but I want to think it a little bit what I really need to buy and in the meantime I will try some workaround.

I was thinking of brewing mash/extract recipes, so my idea was (for a 1.050OG beer, 10l volume):

  1. Mash at a "normal" OG around 1.050s
  2. Boil th wort for 45 minutes (5l of wort more or less)
  3. Add the malt extract for the last 15 minutes (to achieve almost double gravity, let's say 1.100)
  4. Dilute high gravity wort with 5 more liters to get final volume of 10 litres.

Bitterness extraction could be different (but I will assume effect is negligible).

My real question is, will it be a bad idea to mix malt extract toward the end of the boil? Will I get bad flavors from shortly boiled extract?

Any other possible issue, or maybe a better method for that?

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    Since you're already doing AG, which produces the best worts, you may want to avoid LME and stick to DME in the boil, and use the DME as a late <15min addition. LME tends to bring syrupy, oxidized flavors with it.
    – mdma
    May 3, 2013 at 14:26
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    A couple of alternatives to stay AG would be to use a no chill brewing cube and do two batches of mashing. Then combine the wort produced from the two batches. Another alternative would be to sparge with less liquid and add a bit more grain to hit a higher OG in a smaller volume and then dilute on the backend. I believe people do the latter often without any issues. May 3, 2013 at 23:43

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I was just recently looked into this for our local club. From what I read, there were no negative effects from late extract additions. In fact, I found several articles specifically advising it. They refer to adding a small amount of extract to start (some say 15-20%, Papazian says 1lb:1gallon), but I imagine the same principles hold true for your scenario. The obvious caveat is sanitation: make sure the late extract is boiled long enough (15 minutes is good) and that your top-off water is clean.

BeerSmith has a brief article on it that points out this will have a significant effect on hop utilization. He also points out that BeerSmith has a Late Extract Addition option that will recalculate IBUs accordingly.

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    There's another good article about the in May/June 2013 edition of Zymurgy "Malt Extract: Late Addition Brewing" by Amahl Turczyn Sheppach. Light colored beers can benefit from adding 50% or more of the extract when there's 15 minutes left in the boil. You can get lighter beer, with shorter time for Maillard reactions, and better hop utilization, due to lower wort density. (Note Zymurgy is not free, you need to be an AHA member to read: homebrewersassociation.org/pages/zymurgy/current-issue)
    – paul
    May 6, 2013 at 21:28
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Most starter kits are based on low volume boils, but boiling the entire volume of the malt extract for the full boil, this aids with proteins I believe.

The rule of thumb that a few of my friends use is never go further than doubling the volume by dilution.

So 5 litres -> 10 litres is OK.

I have other friends who use all the burners on their cooker and they will create a full boil with smaller volumes and chill each independently then mix and aerate together in the carboy.

I can't say I've ever tasted beer with extract added towards the end, I haven't seen many recipe kit instructions but the ones I have put all the Malt Extract in for the full boil time.

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Bitterness extraction will be very different, so make sure to use a calculator that can adjust for things like that.

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