Quality loss on dillution?

[morrillt]

I was wondering if there is any reason not to dillute / add water on wirlpool? I am planning my equipment and considering oversizing the WP so i can dillute, but a friend said that quality will suffer. I am curious to understand why and how quality would be impacted by adding water in WP? Obvious you would need to add more hops and grains to compensate, but assuming you planned properly how would dilluting impact quality?

Best
Todd

[dick murton]

The first question has got to be, why do you want to dilute at this stage? Is you wort kettle somewhat undersized? It is possible to add more malt and hops, but you will get lower extract performance, particularly liable to wasting the extract from the malt as you will have to stop collecting wort at a higher runoff gravity than you do currently.

If you are not restricted by kettle size, then I would simply add more malt to the mash tun, and extra hops to compensate.

Also consider that if you dilute in whirlpool, you will have additional volume in your FVs, and there may be a risk of losses due to the yeast head not having sufficient space - so you are wasting volume gains.

If I wanted to increase wort volume, I would do it by increasing the malt and sparge volume if the rest of the kit allows. Sure there is a bit more energy used to boil the extra volume, but you may be able to reduce the volume you evaporate, from say 10% to 6%, and you will generate extra hot water from your heat exchanger assuming you have the storage capacity for it.

If I had to dilute after the kettle, the whirlpool is a pretty good place to do it providing you use brewing quality liquor, as you don't have to worry about oxygen pickup as you would have to do if diluting post fermentation.