Should I have covered my pot for the 60 min. Boil?

Got a craft a brew kit and did their hiefewizen set. Did everything exactly to directions. It looks good it just seemed to have reduced a lot during the boil. I added quite a bit of water to get back to a gallon in my carbouy.

Should I have covered the pot?

Thanks

You can do it either way, but generally people do not cover. It is important to get a good vigorous boil to get the full potential of flavor/colors from your grain, and potency from your hops. Covering this much energy leads to boil overs, etc.

When doing extract kits, you'll just need to add water to make up for the lost vapor at the end (as you did). When/if you make the jump to all grain/full boil batches, you'll want to calculate (estimate) the boil off and adjust your initial volume accordingly.

YOU SHOULD NOT COVER YOUR POT DURING THE BOIL. Part of what is happening is you are evaporating off nasty off-flavors.

You did good. Adding water after the boil is totally fine!

Just have a few gallons of pre-boiled, cooled water on hand when you brew. Add it to your boiled wort to bring your total volume up to where you want it.

No always boil cover off because it releases DMS (methyl sulfide) and for me as an all grain brewer I want to reduce from 6 3/4 gallons to 5 3/4 to 6 to concentrate the fermentables

If you're doing a partial boil, covering it is about the worst thing you could do, unless you like scalding hot napalm all over.

For a full batch (especially in a wide pot) I cover to get it up to temperature faster (and cheaper). After that, though, you want to boil it uncovered for two reasons: one, the wort needs to boil vigorously for good coagulation of protein (if you want clear, tasty beer), and two, boiling uncovered let's the dimethyl sulfide boil off. If you cover your pot it will fall back into the beer, and your beer will taste like canned corn (or Rolling Rock).

kpr121 said:

YOU SHOULD NOT COVER YOUR POT DURING THE BOIL. Part of what is happening is you are evaporating off nasty off-flavors.

You did good. Adding water after the boil is totally fine!

Click to expand...

This. Do not cover... you are boiling off DMS.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/DMS

Awesome. Thanks for all the responses guys. Looks like I'm off to a good start. I definitely plan to expand and hopefully get to where I can do my own recipies. Going to use this small batch stuff to get a feel for it then move up slowly.