Extract brewing - Hop boil

[Barge]

I've noticed a lot of extract recipes where the hops is boiled with the malt extract.  As the extraction efficiency seems to diminish with higher S.G. I tend to boil my hops in plain water, using less hops than some recipes suggest (and seem to get away with it).  Is there any reason not to do it this way?

[Shakey_Dog]

Are you doing full boils?

When I was extract brewing I just hopped as normal.  Hopping in another pot just seems like more work.  

I don't know if in the overall picture if it is bad.  But if you happy with the beer then it is ok.  We are home brewers so we do what works for us.

And dam this is a great hobby ya know

Don

[bonjour]

There is no seems about it, hop utilization drops off as SG goes up.  Boiling in water should work.  Consider adding the extract at the end of the boil for most brews to counteract the IBU fall off.  Extract has already been boiled.  Of course, for big beers where you want a complex carmalization, boil the s*** out of it.

Make a "dummy" recipe with the hops to calc the ibu's from the hops.   This will give you a much better read on the hop extraction.

Fred

[SAHomeBrew]

Doesn't this seem kind of similar to cj's hop-water? You should get a lot higher hop utilization. Are you boiling it in a couple qts of water? LESS hops than the recipe calls for... no you got it ALL wrong, you should use MORE hops! lol  

[BeerSmith]

You can make hop tea with just water, but I also believe that having some malt in the water is a good thing, as the chemicals in the malt aid in extracting tha good alpha acids.

I would not worry too much about hop extraction efficiency.  BeerSmith does compensate for boil time and boil OG for extract brewing as long as you have your boil volume set correctly.  Therefore it will predict the IBU's correctly even for a concentrated boil.  The only penalty for doing a concentrated boil is that you may have to add a little more hops than with a full boil.

Cheers!
Brad

[Barge]

I generally boil up the hops in a couple of litres of water, strain it into the fermenter, then rinse it through with hot water used to rinse out the liquid extract tins. With the extract already in the fermenter, I then have to swirl the contents to mix it together before adding about 20L of water etc.

I think dropping the extract in towards the end of the boil sounds like less work. Will give it a go.

Cheers for the replies, fellas!