Boiling down to volume?

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Yettiman,

It's not a bad practice if your sticking to dark beers. The a Maillard reaction is a browning chemical reaction between an amino acid and a sugar. Heat encourages these reactions. Carmelization is an example of a Maillard reaction. These reactions are responsible for the flavor of the crust of bread, as well as most nutty, caramel, and toffee notes in beer. These flavors are the result of compounds known as melanoidins, one of the byproducts of Maillard reactions.

In certain styles, such as bocks, dunkelweizens, and especially doppelbocks, these flavors are desirable. They can also often be found in barley wines. In other styles, however, they may be less desirable, or even a flaw.

How do you measure your water when you fill your pot (kettle)? How much liquid do you squeeze out of the brew bag? What is the vigor of your boil? What is the evaporation rate? (Humidity of the air during boil?) length of boil. Lots of things effect the amount of wort left at the end of boil.

Try using BIABacus? (It's here on this forum and free) It should help getting repeatable results.

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Hi there Yetti,

Boiling down to final volume can be a problem especially with beers that are hop-driven. A better policy is to use less water and top up a little at the end of the brew. This makes things easy.

Another problem with boiling down is that you never really get a good handle on what is going on. If you are spending more time boiling down, how will you get to know your average evaporation rate for example?

One more thing is that when you are boiling down, you are lowering your volume but increasing your gravity. It is important to know, at the end of the day, if you are ending up with too much beer at the right gravity or the right volume at the right gravity or too little beer at too low a gravity or one of the many variations of these.

So, use a bit less water and let your brew ride with no adjustments until it reaches the fermentor. Take a few gravity and volume readings (beginning and end of boil and into the fermentor) and if needs be, top your fermentor up a little.

Can you let me know what software you are using of how you are working out what volume of water to use? If possible, post a recipe file up, spreadsheets and/or a recipe report as there will very likely be a problem happening there as well. The PS below may also help.


PP

P.S. The BIABacus is a bit daunting especially as there is no good help written for it atm. The trick until there is help is learning what to look at first. Here's a version where I have blanked out a lot of stuff so that you are forced to just concentrate on volume figures, total grain weight and gravity.

Volume, Grain Weight and OG Play-Around.xls

There is an interplay between these three very basic things that is not dealt with by any other commercial software besides the BIABacus. Change the numbers in Section B to suit your equipment and the OG in Section C to suit your recipe. After you have done this, the main volume number to look at it is Total Water Needed.

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