Few questions about this new addiction

Do you have a recipe available on that? Hop addition times and yeast will help too. Most of your hops should be late boil or dry hop.

 

This would be my advice. I think the first time you brew, following the kit to establish some sort of baseline is useful. It's hard to know what to suggest unless you post the original recipe. Since you are intent on adding more hops, maybe do some extra at flamout and some as dryhop to increase aroma and flavor. I suggest staggering the dry hop additions. My guess is you don't want to add any as extra bittering additions unless you know for a fact that the kit is not bitter enough for you.

 

Most likely if I'd suggest anything it's going to be aroma hop or dry hop additions. When you get your kit post back with a hop Alpha Acid (AA) and biol times. With kits, they might tell you exactly what's in there, but more often they'll leave you in the dark. It's good to have extra hops. If you don't like the taste, you can dry hop. Don't be afraid to save the extra hops for next batch either.

 

Just off the cuff here from what you've posted so far, but I am pretty sure crystal can be steeped and do not need to be mashed as the sugars are already converted. Second, I have brewed a few batches now, and I run into an issue every brew day even though I preplan and research everything in the weeks leading up to brew day. With all of the things that can go wrong, I HIGHLY recommeend that you follow the directions to the tee for your first brew. It makes troubleshooting a bad beer pretty easy. Once you get the process down then start adding to kits or designing your own beers. I also suggest reading www.howtobrew.com and possibly buying/borrowing the actual book.

 

Just FYI... you can't do a mini mash with just those malts. Neither has the enzymes needed to convert starches to sugars. (Those enzymes come from base malts.) But the good news is that crystal malts doen't need to be mashed. Steeping them is fine.

 

One thing to think about is when you dry hop and transfer to a secondary you will lose a little bit of beer. Dry hoping twice with two transfers(once to secondary and once to bottling bucket) expect to end up with less bottled beer than you plan on especially since it is probably your first time racking with a siphon. I would probably dry hop once with 2oz's of FF.

 

Why would dry hopping once with 2 oz cause you to lose more beer than dry hopping 2x with 1 oz per time? I think an each ounce of hops would absorb the same amount of liquid in both scenarios. Racking of course, does result in loss too, but you wouldn't have to rack each time you dry hopped. Furthermore, some people dry hop in primary, so dry hopping need not involve any racking at all.

 

Are you extract brewing or all grain brewing?
Are there chlorine or chloramines in your water?

 

It looks like you ordered an an extract kit, I think. Water chemistry is not such a big deal with extract brewing, with one exception (below). You can probably use your tap water, or if it is very hard, you could dilute with some bottled water. Without knowing your water chemistry, it's difficult for me to decide what I would do. I would probably use the tap water for the first few batches to see how that works for you. If you switch to all-grain brewing, you may want to think about water chemisry more.

Exception: The one thing that is important about using tap water is that most tapwaters are treated with chlorine and/or chloramine, which will create off flavors in your beer. Chlorine can be dismissed from the water if you pre-boil it or let it sit for a while, but chloramine will not leave the water this way. The two common approaches for getting rid of these chemicals from tap water are using carbon filtration, such as the tap water filter assemblies you can attache to your spigots or camden tablets (potassium metabisulfite) added to the the water before brewing. You can pick up camden tablets at a homebrew shop.

If you have no filter, no camden tabs, and no knowledge of your water treatment, the safest thing to do is use bottled water for this batch.

 

I don't think I said that 2oz once and 1oz twice would be any different when it comes to loss. And I also didn't say that the OP had to rack after every dry hop. I was referring to the OP's plans and questions. The OP's plan is to transfer to secondary. I personally don't use a secondary but telling the OP not to just leads to the same old debate. I only suggested to use 2oz instead of 5oz to limit some loss. The point of my post was just to make the OP aware that between all of the transfers and dry hopping they plan on doing to expect some loss.

 

Sounds good. I guess I misunderstood what you were saying. Perhaps my post will clarify for anyone else who misunderstood. Or maybe I managed to create more confusion, chaos, and mayhem. If so, my work is done.