boil cut short

Last night I started brewing an Extra Pale Ale kit from Northern Brewer.

1lb caramel pils
6lb LME
2oz cascade at start if boil
1oz cascade at flameout
LME added half at start half at 15 mins left

About 40 mins into my boil I lose gas. Apparently it was a problem on the whole block caused by water in the gas lines?!

Went outside to talk with the gas people and they said it would only be a few mins. Lies. About an hour later still no gas and no end in sight. I decided to stir in remaining LME and put into carboy. Poured in last oz of cascade and shook, added water to 5 gal and pitched yeast (wyeast 1056 I believe). Fermentation has already began but am wondering about any effects I may get from a shortened boil and how I added remaining LME and hops. Any thoughts/similar ridiculousness?

Thanks in advance.

From my (very) limited experience. It seems as though you just shortened your 2oz cascade as a 40 minute addition, the 1oz cascade as a 5 minute addition and half of your LME at flameout. My understanding is that you may have lightened the bittering effect of the initial hops addition "slightly" but the result of adding the remaining LME at flameout like that should make your beer lighter in color. You should be good!

In fact, I plan on doing my next brew (Cream Ale) in a similar manner. I'm not a huge "bitter" fan of hops but I LOVE aroma and flavor, so I was purposefully only going to boil for 30-40 minutes and have all but 1 lb of LME added at flamout to get a really light colored beer.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing that you mentioned. Only concern is I added LME an hour or so after flameout (155F approx) and shook carboy to mix then dry hopped basically. That's a while after flameout. Wasn't sure what effect that would have or if I had an infection risk. Kettle sat on stove covered.

Fairly new myself. Have done about 10 batches so far.

If I understand this chart correctly:


You will only get 75% of the hops bitterness from the boil, as compared to the normal 95%. You may get some off-flavors from DMS, and it won't be exactly what you were going for, but you still made beer, and I'm sure it will be okay. As for the risk of infection, I *think* anything above 140 kills most things that we care about in beer. There's only one way to find out now though, so you don't really have much of a choice. RDWHAHB

reverendj1 said:

If I understand this chart correctly:

RDWHAHB

Click to expand...

awesome chart... have never seen that before, thanks for sharing!

I would say this would probably turn out fine and wonderfully hoppy (aroma). There are a few 30 min boil recipes out there that use mostly late additions for aroma AND bittering.

Some people also do an aroma steep at 140* while cooling.

Can't wait to hear the results from this unexpected experiment.

Thanks for all of the responses. I will update thread when I know more!

I bottled this last night. It was very hazy on the bottom but that could have been from carrying it up the stairs. It did not look infected or smell funny. Tasted like beer but not great beer. FG was 1.006! Too low I'm guessing? Northern brewer doesn't give expected FG numbers on their recepies.

Any thoughts?