How bad is boil over?

I'm in the process of making my 4th brew now, and it seems like every time I brew there's at least one boil over. This most recent one I caught it almost instantly and terminated the heat, but there was still what seemed like a lot spilled out on my stove and on the kettle lid.

How much will this effect the final product, and is there anything I can do to correct it if does effect it significantly?

Don't worry it happened to everyone of us. Unless you spilled liters of wort on your stove, it should not noticeably affect the final product.

There is no correction for this, other than watching the pot VERY closely before the boil begins. Also, turn down the element as soon as the boil begins. Then, increase slowly until the boil resumes and stop there. You want a rolling boil, not a "splashing" boil , so try to adjust your element to get that.

Good luck !

Yep, you're OK.

(this may have been better in the "begginer brewers" forum)

Have a spray bottle of clean water handy. Spray that hot break/hop addition down and your boil overs will tend to be a thing of the past unless you are just over working your brew kettle for its capacity. I personally like to keep my pre-boil volume about 1.5 gallons less than the total volume of my kettle.

Fermcap-S. I had one boilover, started adding Fermcap and never had another one. Get'cha a bottle and never look back.

district_davis said:

and on the kettle lid.

Click to expand...

This part worries me a bit. What are you doing with the kettle lid on the pot? Don't boil with the lid on. Boil with the lid off to drive off all that DMS.

I also use Fermcap-S (or equivalent) and rarely have boil overs. You absolutely have to watch the pot like a hawk when the boil is about to start, and for a couple minutes after that. It's just the nature of all the sugar/starch/protien in the wort that is going to cause lots of sticky bubbles and you most likely will have to stir/blow/spray them down at least a little bit until the hot break happens. Once that happens boilovers are much less likely to happen.

Fermcap-S is also helpful in starters to keep the krausen under control on the stir plate in the flask.

Thanks guys!

Oh, and Easy-Off and elbow grease works pretty well to get the wort off the stove.