What general process do you recommend or follow?
Not sure what you're looking for. Maybe you can be a bit more specific?
What I wrote above are methods used and recommendation made by several "advanced" extract brewers, those who have read, tried, and adapted their techniques and "reported back" on their finding through this Forum (and others). There are quite a few variations, none necessarily better than others.
I brewed extract with steeping grains for the first 4 years, mostly following
How to Brew. I know I did a lot of things OK, the beer was very drinkable some even very good, but there were some important areas I was unaware of at the time. If I had only known HBT...
That was before I discovered HBT in 2013 (as well as a few other good sites and forums). I switched to all grain shortly after that. I only use extract now for yeast starters.
I am on the hook to organize some experiments for my homebrew club and I might be able to fit in some boil length trials...I will likely brew some extract beers to create some single hop beers or play around with yeasts.
That sounds like a nice project or presentation!
Perhaps you can get some independent (and uninfluenced) feedback and tally up some sort of stats, ala Brulosophers.
You can easily mash 5-10 gallons of wort and treat each gallon (or 3/4 gallon) with different hop and yeast techniques.
Or to save time, brew the whole batch with one bittering hop, chill, then finish each with a different hop or yeast experiment.
A few years ago 2 of our BJCP class members had dry hopped bottled Kolsch with different hop varieties. Strained out at pouring. It was a good experience and valuable lesson.
You could ferment each in gallon milk or water jugs. A regular drilled bung that fits growlers or gallon "wine" jugs fits those plastic jugs too. Or use their lids, aluminum foil, or plastic wrap during active fermentation, then cap, and vent if they swell up a little.
It seems like most beers will need at least a 15-20 minute boil to get hop bitterness. I cannot imagine that there is much variety in pre-hopped extracts and throwing in a bunch of flame out/whirlpool hops would only work for hoppy beers.
Sure, to get bitterness you need to boil hops or hop oil (hop shots) for that time. Many of today's IPAs rely heavily on late and whirlpool hop additions, it has become very fashionable, inspired by NEIPAs probably. There is also some retrograde occuring.
Prehopped extracts are pitiful. There's quite a bit wider choice now, from what I've seen being offered. But from what I've read, none even approach brews done with some real hops in the boil. They're still too awfully close to kit and kilo, but with some keen ingredient and process tweaks I think they can be much, much better. And won't take much longer to prepare either. Since they aren't boiled we can't really call them brewed now, can we?
There are several threads on non-boiled beer, but haven't looked at them that closely to have a formed opinion.
from the original topic ... 
