Over boil?

[stdean]

Just brewed a new batch and I'm worried I over boiled the wort.

I usually boil about 10L with hops and DME then add LME at the end. Today when I boiled the DME I started with about 8L or so. After the hour at least half of it had evaporated.

The OG at the end was very low (about 1.03) so I'm worried that I mistakenly boiled off most of the malt.

Should I be worried? Did I just ruin this batch?

 

[The_Bishop]

You can't boil off malt.

 

[burninator]

You can't boil off malt.

This. Something else happened here. Are you sure your hydrometer is correct? Did you adjust the gravity reading for the temperature of the wort?

 

[RM-MN]

They are right, you can't boil off the malt extract but you can boil off water which will make your wort very dense. When you add top off water the density of the wort is so high that it doesn't mix well and when you take your hydrometer sample you get mostly top off water and little of the dense wort so your hydrometer reads quite low. The yeast will find the sugars that are in that dense wort and will eat them and mix them with the water so your beer will be just fine.

 

[stdean]

They are right, you can't boil off the malt extract but you can boil off water which will make your wort very dense. When you add top off water the density of the wort is so high that it doesn't mix well and when you take your hydrometer sample you get mostly top off water and little of the dense wort so your hydrometer reads quite low. The yeast will find the sugars that are in that dense wort and will eat them and mix them with the water so your beer will be just fine.

Brilliant. This is exactly what I suspected. Now to sit on my hands for the next 2-3 weeks while it brews...