Boilover = Better Brew?

[cwiseman77]

Just tasted my latest brew, a kind of throw together ESB recipe to use up some of the various almost empty hop packets I had lying in the freezer. Had a few disasters on brew day including a massive boilover onto my electric stove and collapsed muslin when straining into FV resulting in A LOT of hops and break material ending up in the FV. Then on bottling day when I siphoned into my bottling bucket some of the hops that made it into the FV clogged my siphon tube. Anyway due to all the disasters I didn't hold out much hope for this brew and anxiously tried a bottle last night after only 4 days in the bottle

Amazingly it was well carbed and lovely! This is the second brew I've done where I've had a massive boilover and both have resulted in lovely beers. Is this a coincidence? I do concentrated boils for my extract brews so think that when I'm getting a boilover at least it means I've had a good boil and successfully extracting the bitterness from my early hop additions. I recently read somewhere that concentrated boils can have poor hop utilization so this may be why some of my brews have lacked the bitterness I was going for. Need to mess around with brewmate, I'm sure there's a way to work out IBUs for a concentrated boil.

 

[PD]

I would suggest its coincidence....Boilovers do not make for better brews or matrimonial harmony !

A good boil certainly does tho.

Always keep a spray bottle of cold water handy...a few squirts will stop the brew rising up out of the pot.
I've also started to sieve the foam off the top when its arrived at the boil, hopefully this makes for a cleaner wort into the fermenter.

 

[cwiseman77]

Boilovers do not make for better brews or matrimonial harmony !

The latter is definitely true...especially on an electric stove...a sticky sticky mess! I'll try the spray bottle, that sounds like a good trick. I also just bought a large pot, 20l instead of 10l so boilovers should be less likely. Also may increase my concentrated boil from 8l to 12l to improve utilisation.

 

[alanywiseman.]

Why not boil with a gravity of around 1.040 to start with then add the remaining malt extract at 10mins? this should give you better hop utalisation I think.

 

[cwiseman77]

Why not boil with a gravity of around 1.040 to start with then add the remaining malt extract at 10mins? this should give you better hop utalisation I think.

That's the method Palmer suggests in his book but I've never tried it.

 

[Loetz]

When I boiled over, I lost a lot of hop material. I'd imagine that you would lose some hop bitterness, flavor or aroma depending on when the boilover happened.