To boil or not

[wavemaker]

Gooday all. I am brewing using kits and extracts and yeasts, not the one on the can and hops. Question is this. Many years ago when I was brewing and bottling I read that it is a good idea to boil all your ingredients, not the hops and yeast, in a big pot, tip this in the fermenter then add cold water,hops after soaking and finally the yeast. I have been doing this for a long time and make some nice beers. My question is simple. Do I need to boil up the kit,malt etc first or can I just combine the ingredients and put them in the fermenter and fill it up?

 

[pat86]

Maybe post a recipe and steps of your last beer / next planned beer wavemaker- including the ingredients, amounts and timing - you will get much better answers.

As for boiling, if you plan to add dry or fresh hops then doing a boil will be useful if you are looking to have any bitterness, as well as flavour and aroma which could also be achieved by the simpler methods of dry-hopping or steeping a hops tea.

If you are using liquid malt extracts and DME without any pre-bittering like the kit cans, then you definitely want to do a boil with hop additions, as you wouldn't really be able to balance the beers bitterness otherwise.

To try and answer your main question:

you could do either, but you will have more options and probably better beers if you are doing a boil with hop additions and/ or specialty grains.

Use IANH's spreadsheet in the top stickied post in this forum, to calculate how much malt extract to boil up depending on volume. As a super rough guide, you could go with a 4L boil with about 400 grams of dry malt extract to do your hop boils and use that to then dilute the rest of your DME/ LME and then top up with cold water.

 

[mosto]

No need to boil your kits and extract. If you go down the path of steeping spec grains, you will need to boil the resulting liquid.

 

[wavemaker]

Thanks for the replies. I made this brew yesterday, an experiment.
Can of Morgan's Blue Mountain Lager, 1kg DME, .5gm dry corn syrup, sachet of Morgans Pride of Ringwood hops, sachet of Brew Cellar Premium Lager Yeast.
I put the can,DME and corn syrup in a large,thick based pot in around a litre of cold water, stir to combine and then put the pot on my gas burner and slowly bring to the boil, holding it just under for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile the hops have been steeping in a cup of boiling water. I then tip the contents of the pot into my sanitized fermenter,top to 22l with cold water, add hops, take a sample for OG, add the yeast and stir in well, put the top on the fermenter and stash it in the fermenter fridge with ice packs.
As I said, I am looking to branch out and start making some more technical beers,ale, lager etc. Having said that, my brews are always drinkable and some just downright fine.
I have an old fridge lying on it's back for my fermentation room,it can hold 5 fermenters with 22litres in each one. I regulate the temperature with frozen bottles of water and an inside/outside thermometer. I have 4 x 23l stainless steel kegs which fit into my serving fridge so I am usually drinking beer at least 3 weeks old. IE roughly 2 weeks in fermenter and a week in the fridge and generally go through a keg a week unless there is some cause to celebrate and then the kegs don't last so long.

 

[wavemaker]

Gooday, thought I'd bump this to see if there any further comments after having added the brew recipe. TIA

 

[peas_and_corn]

Dry corn syrup?

Looks like a good recipe overall and barring a disastrous fermentation it should make something good. My only thought- you boiled the kit and DME in only a litre of water? It's not very much and a concentrated wort like that will darken more than if it was thinner, plus you will have less hop utilization (when you use them in the boil) than if it were thinner. I'd recommend a five litre boil personally.

I'm not sure why you steeped the hops separately when you were boiling your extract. If you were aiming for hop flavor over bitterness it would have been better to add it post ferment to get as much as possible.

 

[wynnum1]

If you opened a can with a can opener then it is a good practice to clean and sterilize the can opener or boil the contents.

 

[wavemaker]

Thanks for the tip Wynnum1.
peas_and_corn. Thank you for your comments. I only have a small brew pot at the moment,hence the reduced size. I may have underestimated with 1 litre but it would only be 2l, if that. By the time the can of brew is added, the 1kg DME and .5kg corn syrup (for added alcohol content) and then more from rinsing out the can, my pot is pretty full. Also, with that amount of wort, when I top up the fermenter it is the right temp to add yeast. A bigger boil would require me to move and store the fermenter, I like to do the whole process as quickly as I can. Having said that, when I get my new, larger pot I will do as you suggest. I put the hop tea bag in a cup of boiling water as that is what the instructions say to do. I am a bit autistic like that. I have never added anything to my brews post ferment for fear of infection. However if that is what will give me a more hoppy aroma and taste i will give it a go. I will be brewing up on the weekend and will try it. I have used .5kg of grains in my last 2 brews and am looking forward to tasting them. Thanks for your input, most appreciated.

 

[mosto]

If your beer is tasting fine, no need to change your process too much. FWIW, I'll step out what my process was when I did kits, which generally resulted in some pretty decent beer.

Steep grain in around 2L of 70c water for around 20 min.

Remove the grain and boil the liquid for around 20 min adding hops in at various stages according to recipe.

Meanwhile, place unopened can in sink of hot tap water to heat the goo up so it runs out more freely.

After boil, pour liquid into the fermenter, add in any dry extract gradually, stirring in the shit out of it to avoid lumps (always ended up with lumos however)

Pour in any liquid extract and the goo from the can, stir shit out of it again.

Top up with cold tap water, stirring constantly to help with mixing until at desired volume. I found if I didn't do a constant stir I got a high OG, because the extract was concentrated around the tap.

Wort was generally at pitching temp after all this, so chuck yeast in and away you go.

As I say, if you're happy with your beer, no need to change the method much, but this was how I went about it.

 

[zarniwoop]

If you're heading down the path of hops etc then reading John Palmers book (How to Brew) would be recomended, it's how a lot of brewers start down that path. It's available for free at: http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html

(I'm not suggesting you shouldn't ask questions here as well but reading that book changed my entire approach and was extremely useful)

 

[yum beer]

No need to boil the kit tin.
My suggestion would be to put about 100gms of the goo into your litre of water and boil for 5 minutes adding your hops to this. The 5 minute boil will extract a nice hit of flavour and some aroma.
Add this to your fermenter, followed by the rest of your goo, sugars, malts top up water and add your yeast. You will get a better hop profile this way than just siting in a cup of boiled water.

If you are doing grains, steep your grains for 20 minutes then use this liquiid for hop boil instead of goo and proceed as above.

I do remember when I first brewed 20 years ago there were kits that came out of England that required boiling, I recall making a cracking bitter from one. I don't think there would be any now that recommend it.

 

[pat86]

What the above posters said- don't boil all of your malt extract/ kit can. And definitely steep or boil the hops in the wort since you are already boiling. while 2L is small it will be much better than plain water.

Using Ian's sheet you'd probably find about 170gms DME in 2L of water should give you close to 1040 s.g. which much smarter people than I say is the best s.g. for hop utilization

 

[wavemaker]

Fantastic info blokes. I went out an got a 16l stainless pot with the thick solid base from Big Dub this morning so will be using that and following ideas posted above. Many thanks.