60 or 90

[Fallen]

I boil 44L litres and use a kettle with 2x3kW elements. I only use one for the boil. It's not a raging boil but more than a simmer. I lose about 10% per hour in evaporation which is about the amount to aim for.

+1 here (almost)

My boil usually starts out at ~50-52 litres with the aim of getting a 40L final brew length (4L evaporation, 4-6L hop/trub losses depending on recipe and 2L boiler dead volume).

[Kev888]

With my current boiler I tend to go for 60 mins, although in reality any time after that which is convenient does me fine. I seem to get a fair bitterness from the hops in that time and it achieves about 12% evaporation so I'm happy most DMS has gone by then too.

But my new boiler is more covered and also bigger so evaporation is likely to be less. I may therefore have to boil for longer to convince myself that most of the DMS is gone, but thats no problem as most of the time will be spent getting it up to boiling in the first place - half an hour extra hardly makes much difference so I'll probably adopt a 90 mins approach as standard unless the losses to evaporation are too high.

Cheers
Kev

[hebbstar]

I'm experimenting with 60 mash and 60 boil...

Just bought a pressure cooker and was thinking about boiling the hops in there for 20 mins then pitching in to the wort for the 60 min boil. I wondered if I'd get better hop utilisation.

Anybody tried that ?

Cheers

[Aleman]

I may therefore have to boil for longer to convince myself that most of the DMS is gone

Firstly DMS is much less of an issue in ales (made with pale malt) as the DMS precursor is only present in low levels in Pale malt . . . .compared to 6 row and lager malts.
Secondly the rate at which SMM is converted to DMS is very rapid above about 35C so at any time the wort is above 35C . .. and the boiling point of DMS is only 37C, so by the time the malt has mashed . . . sparged and been brought to the boil the significant proportion of DMS will have already evaporated . . . and been lost.

I boil in a partially covered boiler, and have never had a DMS issue in my beers . . . I do wonder if it is as much of an issue as 'hot side aeration'

[Kev888]

Ah, thats useful to know, many thanks. I posted on this before and the general feeling seemed to be that both boil time and evaporation was important, but maybe if DMS is THAT easily driven off I'll mostly just concern myself with time (for hop utilisation and so on), unless I'm using lager malts or something, and 60 mins should do me fine for that regardless of boiler design.

I can spend the extra half hour avoiding HSA

Cheers
kev