My first boil over

Hello,

I was brewing an extract Red Ale last night, thinking I have been lucky to not have had a boil over yet. And of course I walked out of the kitchen back to my room for something and came back to find the stove submerged. The DME was pre hopped, and my starting water was 2 gallons. When the DME was added, it was maybe 3 gallons. After the boil over, it looked like the original 2 gallons.

Has anyone ever lost that much liquid on a recipe they've done frequently? I lost a lot of hops and water, naturally. When I chilled the wort and poured it into the fermenter, it was exceptionally thick, almost like a slightly watered down LME. It was oozing down the funnel.

My carboys are not marked for 5 gallons, for some reason, so I will know how much I actually lost when I bottle in a few weeks. No hydrometer yet, so I have been waiting 3-4 weeks.

I lost a ton on my first boil over too. Now, I watch that bad boy like a hawk, and I move it right off the element when it starts to get close to the top.

Sticky gross burnt-on wort sucks to clean up.

There's nothing you can really do but accept it, learn to be more careful about your boils and move on. You're either going to be short of some volume of beer or it's going to be thinner if you topped up to five gallons instead of adding a preset amount of top up water.

If you knew your Boil Off Rate you would at least have some guess of how much you lost. It would be a little unusual for someone that is not doing all grain to know that since it isnt much help in extract recipes. If however you had all of your DME in the H2O before the boil off you should have lost DME in proportion to the H2O. That would not make your wort any thicker...not sure what that is about, should be no different than any other boil in that regard. If you would estimate that you lost about a third of your wort then it would be reasonable to reduce your total top off H2O to about 1/3 less than a full 5 gal batch or about 3.4 gal total final beer/wort. You could also add additional DME but in truth it is all guesswork at this point. You arent the first to have a boil over and are not the lawst, in fact it isn't YOUR last boil over. Cheers, there is always a next batch, and now a little sooner than if you had a full batch this time.