Hot break

We have had a number of conversations lately in the forums about hot break and cold break and wort clarity.

I'm brewing today so I decided to take a few photos to describe hot break.



The hot break will start to happen after the wort foams up. In the beginning it will look like foam. The phone will rise to bigger and bigger and threaten to boil over.



It's hard to standby and watch your pot boil over so there is no photo of getting that high!

After threatening to boil over for about 15 minutes all of a sudden the foam will disappear.

The wort itself will look like it has pieces of egg drop soup suspended in it. They are fine particles of protein coagulated.





After my boil is done today I will take some photos of the cold break.

I hope this is helpful to new all grain brewers maybe wondering about hot and cold break and how to get the clearest beer possible.


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Good post Yooper! The only difference I have in my process is the "foaming" part doesn't last 15 minutes for me, maybe 5 max but I'm generally only boiling ~7 gallons instead of double that.

Here is one of my cold break pictures from back in January. Or I assume this is cold break.

I am one who suffers from cloudy beer and don't really seem to get the coagulation or massive foaming I see there. Assuming that all other things are fine, do I just need to ramp the temp up faster after sparging? I tend to keep the flame on my burner pretty tame, maybe I'm just slow rolling the process and that's preventing the coagulation?

It will still happen even if you do a slower boil. You might not see it happen as violently though. Another observation I've had is that the foam starts off very dense with tiny bubbles. As the proteins break down the foam will get less dense with larger bubbles until the foam dissipates. It does last around 15 minutes for me as well.

I don't think rate of heating would affect it. With the right ingredients and a good boil, it should hot break anyway. I've been to a guys house where his boil seemed tepid compared to mine, and he got a good break and his beer is not cloudy.

I often try to scrape the foam off the top of the boil before it gets to boiling. Since i started doing that I've noticed I've never come close to boiling over. Unless I toss a bunch of hops in there and don't watch it...

Hot break really does look like egg drop soup. Just bits of stuff floating around in there. And it's hard to get a picture of because of the way it swirls around and the wort reflects flash back at you.

I have a lot of steam in some of those photos so the focus isn't very good. And on the small sample the focus is pretty bad so I took another picture of the small shot glass that I had that shows hot break pretty well. By the way I'm on my iPhone and I hate typing so I'm dictating and hot break comes out as heartbreak. That made me laugh.


I'm boiling 12 gallons in a 15 gallon keg and almost every batch I do threatens to boil over. But after the hot break I can boil pretty hard and not come close to boiling over.


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anyone who has cooked pasta, rice or oatmeal should recognize hot break

Am I the only one who just grabs his pot and pulls it off the burner before it boils over? I mean, it's not my goal, but it happens more times than not. I've been meaning to look into some fermcap, but haven't gotten around to it yet :cross:

Interesting. I have seen it before when brewing with others in town, so I am aware of what it should look like. Though I regularly have no break and no foam, this should be fun to figure out...

Anyone else get hot break in their starters? I use Briess light DME and I wonder if it's more of a chemical reaction to my well water moreso than hot break. Why wouldn't the hot break have occured at the Briess factory instead of being shipped to me?

I get hot break with some of my starters also. I have no idea how or why. I tend to use briess light DME.

Still the amount of hot break or cold break I get with extract is nothing like I get with all grain!

I don't use ferm-cap much anymore although I have used it in the past. I used it more in my starters to avoid a boilover in the flask.


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Okay. I put a sample in the hydrometer. I have a counterflow chiller so I don't have a way to separate out the break material. It starts to separate out and then falls completely out with a little bit of time.

I will take another photo in about five minutes to show how much cold break does drop out along with the hot break.




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grathan said:

Anyone else get hot break in their starters? I use Briess light DME and I wonder if it's more of a chemical reaction to my well water moreso than hot break. Why wouldn't the hot break have occured at the Briess factory instead of being shipped to me?

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I get a small amount of hot break, maybe .5-1 ounce in a 1.5L starter with light DME.

Homercidal said:

I often try to scrape the foam off the top of the boil before it gets to boiling. Since i started doing that I've noticed I've never come close to boiling over. Unless I toss a bunch of hops in there and don't watch it...

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I have no scientific evidence, but the president of my brew club and head brewer at Manayunk Brewery has said that we shouldn't be scoping the foam / hot break material out. He claims it helps with head stability and retention. Curious if this is true or not.

Jupapabear said:

Here is one of my cold break pictures from back in January. Or I assume this is cold break.

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Yes, that is cold break! Good thing, as I forgot to take a photo of the "end" of the hydrometer sample. The wort on top gets totally clear, and the hot break and cold break fall to the bottom. We can use your photo as an example of cold break material!

Yooper said:

View attachment 195291

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And that is hot break.


Cold break is more of "big goobers" in the wort- fluffy clouds of big globs of coagulated protein. Hot break is tiny "egg drop soup" type of coagulated proteins.

If you get a good hot break, and a good cold break, the resulting wort tends to be nice and clear. And in general, clear wort makes clear beer.

There are some things, like non-flocculant yeast strains, that still can create a hazy beer- but even wheat beers will be mostly clear if a moderate to high flocculant yeast strain is used.

There are some things to consider if you don't get a hot break. One is that you didn't get a hard enough boil going. You don't need to boil the **** out of the wort, but you do need a nice hard rolling boil. Try that first. If you still don't get a good hot break, that could be related to mashing procedure and mash pH.

A beer that doesn't go through a good hot break won't just be hazy in the end, but it will have stability issues as well and probably foam/head formation and retention issues.

dobe12 said:

I have no scientific evidence, but the president of my brew club and head brewer at Manayunk Brewery has said that we shouldn't be scoping the foam / hot break material out. He claims it helps with head stability and retention. Curious if this is true or not.

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I don't think that is accurate, although I've heard Jamil Z say that hot break should be removed due to flavor impacts if it is left in the wort. I don't have a good way to filter out hotbreak- it's pretty small!- so I sort of ignore that advice.

It's weird that one pro would say that it helps head stability and retention, and one pro to say that it has a negative flavor impact.

I don't have an answer for that, but I can't see how hot break that comes out of solution could possibly be important for head stability and retention- it doesn't resuspend and create more proteins in the finished beer.

I can say that as far as I could tell it doesn't affect head retention at all. I have not done any actual study on it, but the couple of beers that I made and scraped the foam off the top seemed just fine. Some had more head than others, based on the ingredients used.

I imagine there is still PLENTY of protein and matter for the yeast to make use of after the foam is scraped.

NickTheGreat said:

Am I the only one who just grabs his pot and pulls it off the burner before it boils over? I mean, it's not my goal, but it happens more times than not. I've been meaning to look into some fermcap, but haven't gotten around to it yet :cross:

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I just spray mine with cool water.

jlg4398 said:

I just spray mine with cool water.

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I use that and I also keep a small cooler of ice cubes nearby.

toss a couple in when it's gettin close.

This is a weird question, but here goes.

I do overnight biab, and at the end of the night, I heat up the wort to 190 so that it will hold its temperature above 140 until morning. I definitely get foaming and protein coagulation during this. Does hot break form before boiling temperature and is there any disadvantage of going through a second heating the next morning on the way to boiling?

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Yeah, just before boiling. No ill effects (unless the hot break gets scorched on the bottom while heating? not sure).

This is an example of hot break material, right?




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carlpb said:

This is an example of hot break material, right?

View attachment 195594


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Yep.

To keep from boiling over, I used to spray water on the foam. Lately I have been using my vacuum - turned the hose around to blow air - and blow the air over the foam. It seems to break the foam down much faster than the water did.

And since the hot break foam will suddenly rise up, a quick way to break it back down is really nice to have in my arsenal of brew tools.

The hot break material in the APA I brewed on Easter.

I've been skimming my hot break foam just before the boil when it turns that dark yucky color. I don't really know if it helps or hurts but thought I'd try it and see.