Nightmare brew day...will it be ruined?

[SasquatchSmith]

So, yesterday was far and away the least successful of my 3 brew days so far. The goal was a 2.5 gallon imperial chocolate stout. My pot is only about 3 gallons, but it has been enough for my first two brews (although just barely, had a slight boil over the first time.)

So anyway...I started the brew with 1 gallon of water. Steeped all my grains for 15 minutes, then brought to a boil and added all the DME. It very quickly got out of control and boiled over...like, a lot. So I took it off quick, cleaned up the stove, emptied a little of it into another pot, and got it boiling again...this time if boiled over even MORE aggressively. It was alllll over the ****ing place. What a mess. Should have taken pictures but I was in panic mode

So I took it off heat for about 15 minutes while cleaning up, then, being the stubborn idiot I am, I tried AGAIN...fortunately this time it stayed at a nice rolling boil and I was able to make the rest of my additions, boil for a while, cool, and get it in the fermenter with some cold water.

Question is...will the fact that I stopped the boil twice cause problems with my brew?

I will be purchasing a far larger pot in the near future

 

[JHawKS]

Been there, done that. You'll be fine! Larger pots are a definite plus though!

 

[kh54s10]

Your beer is probably OK. The taste might be a bit off "style" but still good.
When adding extract remove the pot from the burner. You also just need the wort gently boiling it does not have to look like a volcano in there.

 

[BamaRooster]

Stopping twice will not have a negative effect as long as you paused your brew timer when you took the pot off the fire. The reason for pausing the timer is to get the full boil time for your hop utilization. I would be more concerned about the sugar that may have been lost due to the boil over. For the most part the foam is all air and proetien but do contain some sugars. A small amount of boil over is not an issue, but you said significant boil over, so I was wondering how much you lost and what your SG was?

 

[SasquatchSmith]

Stopping twice will not have a negative effect as long as you paused your brew timer when you took the pot off the fire. The reason for pausing the timer is to get the full boil time for your hop utilization. I would be more concerned about the sugar that may have been lost due to the boil over. For the most part the foam is all air and proetien but do contain some sugars. A small amount of boil over is not an issue, but you said significant boil over, so I was wondering how much you lost and what your SG was?

I did lose a good amount of liquid, so when I added water later I didn't go all the way to 2.5 gallons. Hopefully it's at least drinkable, that's all I'm hoping for at this point. After the second boil over I very nearly poured it all down the drain. Glad I didn't though! OG was right around 1.10.

 

[malevolent]

Fermcap-s is your friend. Add it after steeping as you are bringing your beer to a boil and it will eat away at the foam that builds up. Should also help the very violent fermentation of a stout too.

 

[tre9er]

If there were any fermentable sugars in it (there were) then it will taste like beer and be drinkable. Cheers.

 

[shawnbou]

I did lose a good amount of liquid, so when I added water later I didn't go all the way to 2.5 gallons. Hopefully it's at least drinkable, that's all I'm hoping for at this point. After the second boil over I very nearly poured it all down the drain. Glad I didn't though! OG was right around 1.10.

It'll be drinkable. You may have lost some sugar, but I suspect it will be hard to detect in an imperial chocolate stout.

The IPA I've got fermenting now boiled over 3 times in about 3 minutes while I was waiting for my hot break. I still had a gallon of mash runnings in a pitcher nearby, so I just added a little of that and continued. Lost a point or two off my target OG, but I can live with that. The worst thing was cleaning the outside of the kettle!

 

[SasquatchSmith]

It'll be drinkable. You may have lost some sugar, but I suspect it will be hard to detect in an imperial chocolate stout.

The IPA I've got fermenting now boiled over 3 times in about 3 minutes while I was waiting for my hot break. I still had a gallon of mash runnings in a pitcher nearby, so I just added a little of that and continued. Lost a point or two off my target OG, but I can live with that. The worst thing was cleaning the outside of the kettle!

The worst for me was taking the burner off to find a puddle sitting below it. Sopping that up was a huge pain. What a ridiculous mess. My first brew, an IPA, boiled over but it was just once and it was just foam, I got it under control pretty quick...this one was 10x worse!

Fortunately I won free tickets to a dinner last night that included tastings of 13 different sours, so that took my mind off the disaster that was brew day #3

 

[ADL]

I just had a brew day like that this weekend, got my first boil over and had a huge mess to clean up. On top of that I forgot to do the late addition of extract so while my wort was cooling I was frantically trying to boil all the extract in a small amount of water... didn't end well, the pot nearly exploded with foam once it reached boiling point. Then I remembered I had a spray bottle and kept the heat a little lower and fought back the foam by constantly spraying it with a fine mist of ice cold water.

In the end I hit my SG and its fermenting away just fine, I'm sure it'll turn out fine (I hope), yours probably will too.

 

[unionrdr]

Just a little FYI,the foam boiling over is the hot break. Just keep a spray bottle of cold water & your spoon/paddle handy when the hot break starts foaming up. That misting of water & stiring will take care of it.