[bcrowell]

I could steep my specialty grains while waiting for the water in the brewpot to come to a boil, then dump the liquid in with the water when it's ready, so it's present during the boil. On the other hand, I could wait until after the boil is over, or maybe add the liquid during the boil.

All other things being equal, it would be most convenient for me to do the specialty grains first, then let them cool while I'm doing my boil, and only add them to the main pot at the very end. This would help to give me a quick drop in temperature, which would be nice.

Is there any advantage to having the specialty-grain liquid in the wort earlier on? I suppose a higher boil volume would increase my hops utilization a little, although probably not by a huge amount. Are there fermentable sugars that will only be released if I boil the specialty-grain liquid for a while, or is it so poor in fermentable sugars that it doesn't matter? Does boiling the specialty-grain liquid affect the taste?

[mabrungard]

It is preferrable to add the liquid at the early part of the boil.  There are proteins and other compounds that need to be boiled so that they will coagulate and drop.  In addition, that liquid has some extract and the gravity of the remaining boil would be a little low and the hop extraction would be increased somewhat.  That could be compensated for by reducing the hopping very slightly. 

I don't think that the small volume of liquid is really going to do much in your quest to chill the wort after the boil.  Its maybe 10 to 20 percent of the batch volume and even if it was at 32F, its heat sink capacity wouldn't come close to the heat content of the remainder of the batch at around 200F.

[bcrowell]

Thanks for the reply!

-Ben

[Kit B]

I could be wrong...But, I think you might be inviting infection, if you add at the end of the boil or after the boil.

From what I've been told, grain harbors bacteria & wild yeast.
You want to kill those, before fermentation begins.