I'm very eager to start this as my official second batch. Total noob here. I'm still reading through several beginner books (The Joy of Brewing). Had a few questions about IBU calculations, boil volumes, and extract addition.
I found a program that I've been using to keep track of recipes (Beer Alchemy) and I attempted to enter all ingredients and times as mentioned but the calculated IBU comes off as short. I entered a boil volume of 2.5gal as I didn't want to take as much time to get to a boil (BB blonde ale kit recommended vol.) and I entered the hop recommendations on here (GHM 2, Styrian 1, Saaz 1) and even lower recommendations (1.8/0.8/0.4) and the calculations for IBU came out no higher than 15 and as low as 11. Do I need to adjust for the lower boil volume? Do I have to add more volume to get 5 gallons? The boil volume seemed to affect it the most which I understand is related to viscosity and dissolution of alpha acids? Can I just add more hops evenly till it calculates an IBU of 20-25? Is the app reliable or did I mis-enter something somewhere?
And as far as extract additions, can they all be mixed in the boil initially? Do they need to be added every 10-20 minutes? Is time a factor when adding the extracts?
Any help is greatly appreciated. If all goes well with the first few brews I can see this turning into an obsession