Recycling blowoff?

I kind of know the response to this but thought I'd get some feedback. I brewed a Dubbel this weekend. Pitched it with a WL Trappist yeast starter. 5.5 gals into 6 gal Better Bottle. Within 3 hours I was blowing off bigtime. I have lost a gallon of beer! Now I am down to less than 5 gallons before I even rack to secondary. Figure I lose another 1/2 gallon there and I have this 6 hour brewing process and 6 month aging process yielding only 4 gallons more or less of finished product. Sheesh!

Finally I am no longer blowing off but I have a two liter blowoff bottle full of what appears to be just plain old wort. I was wondering whether anyone has ever given that a quick boil and reintroduced it to their carboy. I have already boiled it but am reluctant to throw it in for chance of it tainting the whole batch with bitter resins from the blowoff process.

Thoughts?

I wouldn't add it back in. Boiling the blowoff and adding it back would introduce everything from hop resins to dead yeast cells to your beer.

Offer it up to the beer gods and maybe next time look at fermenting in a 6.5 of 7 gallon pail?

I'd throw it out. Several reasons why- one is that I assume you had some sanitizer in the vessel, so the blow off is a combo of trub, beer, and sanitizer. Two, it was exposed to the air since it was not in the carboy. Three- boiling it would remove the alcohol anyway.

So, the "beer" from the blow off is a combo of boiled sanitizer, and oxidized beer with the alcohol boiled off. If you want to drink it, go ahead, but don't put it in the carboy with the good stuff!

mmb said:

I wouldn't add it back in. Boiling the blowoff and adding it back would introduce everything from hop resins to dead yeast cells to your beer.

Offer it up to the beer gods and maybe next time look at fermenting in a 6.5 of 7 gallon pail?

Click to expand...

The beer gods taxed me heavily on this one. Maybe I will be rewarded with an awesome beer. I have very high hopes for this one. I made it from a recipe for which I won a local competition back in '93. But then I did it with Extract and Specialty grains. This was AG.

BTW, I just tasted the blowoff and there is an acrid bitterness that answered the question for me quite decisively.

And, blowoff does contain yeast cells, so its not 'plain old wort'...