Boil length impact xbmt

[DerbyshireNick]

http://brulosophy.com/2015/03/11/the-im ... t-results/

Posted this on FB but thought I would share it too. Quite interesting reading. I love anything that challenges "Conventional Wisdom" because I am such a rebel!

[timbo41]

Was just about to post that after reading on the fb page. !!
Its a good read, I've often wondered where this covention of boil time comes from, much as I've wondered previously about hop amounts per brew, why under utilised hops can't be re used, why closed fermentation is considered "better" than traditional yorkshire squares etc etc ad infinitum!!!
Much of my curiousity comes from my conviction that a flemish housewife circa whenever didn't faff about brewing a saison for harvest, thinking about hop utilisation, what yeast strain , whether to use flaked barley or torry.....a more intuitive approach, garnered by hand me down knowledge....a chuck it in and see approach....if it was crap the itinerant workers wouldn't return next harvest!!
But I digress...been a long day on the bread round today!
Good share cheers

[Rick_UK]

Thanks for sharing. Agree with your sentiment entirely! Rules are there to be broken!

This could save quite a bit of time and propane....

[DerbyshireNick]

I think there are two kinds of people. Those that get a kick out asking WHY and moving forward and those that find comfort in following the rules. Yes, asking why and trying things might lead you nowhere but... if we don't ask why.. whats the point?

I have seen it in so many conversations where people will argue for the use of a traditional method without anything other than "thats what everyone does" to back it up. They might throw some quote in there or whatever but was the person who made the quote just doing the same as them. Without trying things for yourself you will never know.

I certainly know I went through a phase of no-chilling just because it suited my process at that given time and it had zero impact on the beer. But others will talk to me like I am mad. Based on nothing but dogma. If something is said enough, by enough people it becomes true.

[Rick_UK]

Yep, I had the same experience with no-chill and still use it on occasion when I'm pushed for time.

Brewing is definitely more an art than a science. I like to think of it as a few key principles around which you can be as creative as you like. Innovation and new discoveries don't come from blindly following the rules and accepting everything as indisputable fact. Look at Nazi Germany to see where blindly following the rules can lead people.... but I digress. We should probably have this discussion in the tap room!

Rick

[AnthonyUK]

Yep, I had the same experience with no-chill and still use it on occasion when I'm pushed for time.

Brewing is definitely more an art than a science. I like to think of it as a few key principles around which you can be as creative as you like. Innovation and new discoveries don't come from blindly following the rules and accepting everything as indisputable fact. Look at Nazi Germany to see where blindly following the rules can lead people.... but I digress. We should probably have this discussion in the tap room!

Rick

Unfortunately Rick you have fallen foul of Godwin's law and so your point in invalid

[Aleman]

This is the result of one experiment, one data point, one batch of beer.

Throw all of the results of every other experiment done over the! last 60/70 years out of the window because someone has 'proved' that they are all wrong!! We have at last got eh result we wanted , and no longer have to worry about boiling to get good bitterness extraction (Just use a bucket load of hops - don't worry about all the co humulone that's bollocks as well, so what if the beer all tastes like Marmalade and resin and you can't taste anything else all night that's good beer!!!), or About the hot break (coz Palmer says that happens in the first 10-15 minutes anyway, and we've already done an xBeeriment, that proves hot break and trub is irrelevant for clear beer).

Sorry guys I guess I have my cynical head on this morning, I'll ask a couple of questions and leave it up to you to answer.
Just how much energy globally is used by the huge brewing conglomerates?
How much time and effort globally is invested by huge brewing conglomerates annually to try and reduce energy usage?

If something as simple as reducing the boil time by 2/3rds (And therefore the energy usage and costs), produced beer that was just as good as one boiled for the 'conventional' time, do you think that these brewing conglomerates would actually still be boiling hard for 90 minutes??

There is a massive investment in brewing science around the world, to desperately reduce costs and improve 'quality', and these are released in papers from the like of the IoB and JIB, as well as the Royal Society of Chemists.

While I welcome innovation and experimentation sometimes I wonder about the motives about what someone is trying to prove.

[AnthonyUK]

I think if nothing else it opens up discussion Aleman.
I don't particularly agree with this one but it does point out that if you have an understanding of the process and are OK with the limitations then a 30 min boil is possible at least for some styles e.g. hop forward that hide certain flaws.

[DerbyshireNick]

absolutely. Please don't confuse entertaining the concept as endorsement.

Its ok to want to immediately shut any idea like this down. Its absolutely hardwired into us to do this. Its commonly referred to as the need for consistency in decision making psychology.

In terms of Alemans questions about big brew ltd we do need to consider that they are brewing on a different scale. Does boil length scale along with volume? Big Brew ltd wouldn't research this as homebrew boil length investigations do not benefit them. Lets be clear I am not selling the result of this xBmt. But what I am selling is that there is a conversation to be had and clearly the results from this single data point show that this isnt a binary topic. Its not 30 minute boil = bad, 60 minute = good. There is more at play here and its that we should seek to understand. My immediate thought is, ok in this case it worked out. Why? In what cases might we get a negative result. Why?

I put my hands up and admit I don't buy it. But I certainly want to understand it.

Ive done some initial out of interest musing. I found some data that says the removal of unwanted compounds is directly related to the percentage of volume evaporated with 2% being the minumum and 5% being ideal. Now... evaporation is driven by surface area exposed to the air and not boil volume. As we know the volume to surface area ratio is not 1:1.

See my excelling...


What this could mean is that on a smaller scale, 40 minutes is the same as 60 on a larger scale.

By my thinking the greater the size of your boiler in volume (assuming its in proportion) the lesser as a percentage of volume you loose during the boil, and maybe, just maybe that is what means BigBrew ltd needs to boil for more time because what they actually strive for is a boil off percentage.

Musing based on reading http://www.daltraining.eu/WebHelp/003_W ... iling_.htm

[Aleman]

I think the phrase "hopped aggressively with Amarillo" gives a clue as to why this 'worked' . . . and the fact that the beer was drunk rather young again helped . . . and it was fined to clear it up (removing the polyphenol haze from the aggressive hopping).

Try the same experiment with a traditional beer, something along the lines of a low gravity flavourful mild, or even something line a south German Pilsener where a massive hop hit isn't the one and only flavour, and see how the beers change over the space of 12 months.

Big Brew Ltd does brew on pilot plants, some of which come into homebrew territory, I know of one that use a 100L plant for pilot brews before scaling up to 2BBL and then 20BBL. I was also working for Big Brew Ltd when we had to recall 20,000L of Lager because it hadn't been boiled properly and threw a chill haze in the bottle.

There is some great stuff on brulosophy, but, without going much further into 'why' it 'worked' for this batch, then you can't just draw the simple conclusion that 30 minute = good, 60 minute = bad. There are a lot of things to measure and compare, but without Big Brew Ltd labs those measurements can't (and won't) be done.

Like Mr Arthur Bass I lament the fact that this craft is rapidly becoming a running one

[DerbyshireNick]

Aleman, I strongly suspect you are right.

But.. just out of interest I crunched the numbers as above to look at the volume of evaporation per hour based on surface area and what % of the wort volume that makes up. Using this calculator http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/evapo ... d_690.html

if I have understood the link in my previous post correctly and its all about evaporation % in terms of measuring "bad things removed" then clearly there is a difference per hour when scaling volume.

Ignoring the top one as the calc wouldn't work with such a low value. We can clearly see that the greater the volume the less % of the total wort is evaporated per hour. Does this change anything? I dunno, thats the limit of my capacity. But this http://www.daltraining.eu/WebHelp/003_W ... iling_.htm seems to suggest it would.




*disclaimer: my mind turd could very well be just that. I accept I may have got this completely wrong.

Please keep in mind I am playing devils advocate a little here.

[Aleman]

It's not all about boil off, and evaporation rate. Of course this does apply to stuff like DMS (just as one example), where you have to convert the SMM to DMS and then drive it off, but with a good quality barley, and a good maltster the SMM levels are controlled in the malt, and therefore boil times can be shortened with little impact on the final DMS levels in the wort. Luckily for us in the UK, it's not an issue as our malts are low in SMM compared to continental and US malts, so we can get away with a lid on boil.

Funnily enough Big Brew Ltd are doing everything they can to reduce evaporation rates . . . and therefore energy input into the boil, with some of the modern kettles they are now using evaporation rates as low as 2.5% . . . but still boiling for 90 minutes. The one thing that they do want to keep as high as possible is wort movement, that rolling bumping action is vital for so much (particularly hop utilisation and hot break formation as examples). These modern kettles use calandrias either built into the kettle or external to the kettle and pumps are used to move the wort around. An internal calandria looks like a industrial metal extractor chimney, but it has the heating elements built in at the base. The wort is heated by the elements boils and rises to the top where it hits the cover and sprays out with some force to be returned to the kettle. The agitation generated by a calandria is many orders greater than a standard rolling boil, and so the amount of heat required (and the thermal loading of the wort) is significantly reduced, but teh boiltime still needs to be the sam to let all the reactions proceed to completion.

Oddly enough there was a recent kickstarter project for a brewing machine that took into account the use of an external pump and heater for the boil. The wort never actually gets to a rolling boil staying at around 97-98C, but because of the pumped agitation hop utilisation and hot break formation was normal (or so they claim :p)

[DerbyshireNick]

Thats an interesting insight, cheers Aleman!

Yes that caught my eye about the pictobrew or whatever it was called that it never actually "boils".

[Rick_UK]

Unfortunately Rick you have fallen foul of Godwin's law and so your point in invalid

Hmmm. Not sure that would be classed as a "law" in the scientific sense....

[Rick_UK]

Double post