> No, they didn't - you do not need (or should) boil the water. If you did boil it, you would then need to let it cool down before adding the yeast. Home-brew k

> No, they didn't - you do not need (or should) boil the water. If you did boil it, you would then need to let it cool down before adding the yeast. Home-brew kits suggest using a fairly small amount of hot water to disolve the malt extract, and to get it up to fermentation temperature. Boiling is a pretty important step in brewing, both in the home and in the commercial brewery. Yes you could technically make beer without boiling it, but that is not the norm. Boiling is used not only for sanitation, but also to allow the hop oils to isomerize and become soluble in the wort, as well as reduce the wort volume to make the wort more concentrated, since the sparging step produces a lot of diluted wort (when using grains rather than extract). Wort in a can (malt extract) means you may not be concerned with concentrating the wort since you could control that, but you still generally want to isomerize the hop oils. Your point about needing to wait for the wort to cool is correct, but that's precisely what brewers do.. they cool the wort until it gets to yeast 'pitching' temperature