first batch disasters

Everything went just great until I decided to put the lid on my boiling pot and yep you guessed it, boil over. My wort boiled for about 40 min. before that. Man what a mess. Thank goodness the wife went off with my sister. I managed to clean everything up before she got home. I got my pale ale in the fermenter and it made about 4 gals. I`m boiling another gal. of water to add to it, I hope that`s O.K. I`ll let you know how it all turns out.

Burch

I should be OK but if you had a really long boil-over (by how you wrote it, it sounds like it was boiling unattended for a while), you may have lost some fermentables in the process, so it might not quite have a full pair, alcohol-wise, when the time comes to drink it. You could call it home brew light if so. It will probably still taste good.

You shouldn't put a lid on a boiling wort. It is the wrong thing to do. You want to drive of volatiles and reduce the wort. With the lid on this will not happen or be hampered.

The lid was only on it for about a half a minute. I walked away and heard it boiling over then immediatly ran to it and got it back under control. I did loose some sediment though. It`s ferminting now and the temp is holding at 74 degrees. Is that too warm for an India pale ale ?

orfy said:

You shouldn't put a lid on a boiling wort. It is the wrong thing to do. You want to drive of volatiles and reduce the wort. With the lid on this will not happen or be hampered.

Click to expand...

Not to hijack the thread, but I have a question about this aspect of the boil.

Until I do some upgrades, I am boiling my wort on a stove with a low hanging vent fan. Too keep the condensation from collecting on the vent, then falling back into the boil, I put the lid on the kettle, with it partially lifted on the one side, for the first part, then it was tilted against the wort chiller for the last 20 minutes or so.

The wort was 'venting' (not sure what to call that) but the condensation was going back in off the lid.

Was I preventing the volatiles from being expelled?

What Pat`s describing is why I decided to put my lid on the pot. The Jen-air above my stove was dripping into the boil. I partially covered the top also, so be carefull Pat I only left mine for a second and had the boil over.

I actually brewed yesterday, doing what I described....and did not have any problems.

But Orfy's post got me thinking/worrying a bit about the volatiles

The big "volatile" that most people worry about is DMS. However, there have been some good interviews with the guys from Breiss Malt Extracts on Basic Brewing Radio where they debunked some of that. If you are brewing with extract, DMS isn't a big deal, most of it has already been driven off during the manufacturing process.

When I was doing extract, I would always have to leave the lid on partially (and I'd make sure to not let much condensation fall back into the pot). This worked OK, it was the only way I could maintain a nice boil with 2.5 or 3.0 gallons in the pot. Never noticed an issue with DMS.