Boiling a kit beer and adding Irish moss

Pete21 · Aug 4, 2019

I have just syphoned my 1st full grain brew into a plastic pressure barrel and I was impressed how clear it was, this I put down to the Irish moss I added at the last 15 minutes of the boil.What I have done today is take a Burton bridge bitter kit and boiled it for 13 minutes with Irish moss in it, in the hope that the beer will be clear when I come to place it into a barrel,I know that the manufacturer has probably already used Irish moss in the malt when they boiled it,however I have always had to use fining's when using the kits.This is something I loath to do as I feel it affects the overall feel and taste of the ale, as for boiling malt from kits with the sugar added , I used to do this years ago to try to achieve a richer caramel taste to the beer and I had good results.
so my question is has anyone else tried this method of adding Irish moss to a tin of malt extract?

simon12 · Aug 4, 2019

No but am interested in the results

Llamaman · Aug 8, 2019

What volume did you boil the extract at?
The risk to this approach is that you darken the wort and drive off hop aroma.

Pete21 · Aug 8, 2019

Llamaman said:
What volume did you boil the extract at?
The risk to this approach is that you darken the wort and drive off hop aroma.

darkening the wort is not a problem as it's a bitter, however in the past when I boiled tinned wort to caramelise the sugars a bit the wort did not appear to darken, I was going to add a hop tea bag prior to bottling it so that is not an issue, have you tried this method before and what results did you get, thanks

Llamaman · Aug 8, 2019

I’ve not tried boiling prehopped extract as it serves no useful purpose (to me) and has downside risks (above) and practical problems (you’ve got to cool it down afterwards, negating some of the time savings of kits).
If you’re worried about clarity, have you considered cold crashing as an alternative to finings?