First extract brew

After some mulling I've decided to try extract brewing. Whilst I'd love to go all grain, I don't have the equipment, or perhaps more importantly the space for the equipment. What I do have is an 11.5 litre capacity stockpot. This obviously poses a slight problem in making a 5 gallon (23 litre) brew. But perhaps the cloud has a silver lining because by adding the bulk of the water (cold) to the wort after boiling I should be able to cool the wort to yeast pitching much more quickly -and possibly aerate it at the same time.

I intend to reduce the boil volume to 6 litres to comfortably fit in the pot and allow plenty of foaming space. Because of hop-utilisation rates changing with extract concentration I am using the excellent Beer Engine to recalculate the amount of extract to use such that I am maintaining the original gravity of the recipe - the remainder will be added to the fermenting vessel. As I am using spray dried extract rather than liquid I'm assuming I can get away without boiling it to get rid of bugs like I would have to with liquid extract.

My first brew is going to be a simple Hefeweissen wheat beer. Recipe to follow.