90 minute boils v shorter boils

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I thought the tradition of the longer boil was due to the old style of malt, and modern grains are comparatively very different to those of 50-100 years ago. Therefore the issue of dms and other undesirable side effects are greatly diminished.

Surely a brewery has done the simple comparison of splitting a batch and doing a 15-30-60-90min boil and running the resultant wort through a GC and getting a full chemical breakdown to understand protein, fermentables and other differences?
 
Nicks90 said:
I thought the tradition of the longer boil was due to the old style of malt, and modern grains are comparatively very different to those of 50-100 years ago. Therefore the issue of dms and other undesirable side effects are greatly diminished.

Surely a brewery has done the simple comparison of splitting a batch and doing a 15-30-60-90min boil and running the resultant wort through a GC and getting a full chemical breakdown to understand protein, fermentables and other differences?
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Check out what Crisp maltings advise, minimum boillength one hour for ales 45, minutes for lagers.
 
I'm guessing if commercial brewers boil for 80 mins with the time and energy savings if they didn't there must be good reasons for it.
I have always followed recipes exactly, only more recently doing my own Smash recipes, grateful for all the advice though, as you say with most things home brewing, it's subjective.
 
DixeySJ said:
Interesting contribution to this here ...
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Love David Heath, he knows his stuff!

I always boil for 30 mins and had some success, but one of my last beers was rife with DMS. There was no pilsner malt in it either, it was Golden Promise with a little caramunich. It is all dreadfully confusing as I'm not sure if I should carry on with the 30 or go back to 60 (as I did at the very beginning) and boil off more flavour.
 
Tess Tickle said:
Love David Heath, he knows his stuff!

I always boil for 30 mins and had some success, but one of my last beers was rife with DMS. There was no pilsner malt in it either, it was Golden Promise with a little caramunich. It is all dreadfully confusing as I'm not sure if I should carry on with the 30 or go back to 60 (as I did at the very beginning) and boil off more flavour.
Click to expand...
Annoying. If you can afford the duplication, doing the brew again with everything the same apart from the boil time might give a clue. I also noted in DH video the contribution of yeast to DMS and the value of increasing fermentation temp at the end - you might try pushing that a bit more?? Good luck ... ;)
 
I always thought, probably mistakenly, that antique boils were much longer so that the very last drops of sugar could be sparged out of the malt and then the water boiled off to increase the strength. Fuel, it seems, was cheap. But before that, I don't think sparging was all that common and parti-gyling was more the thing. So I don't know. In the early days of homebrewing it was always a 90 minute mash and a 90 minute boil. The latter, allegedly, was to get the most bitterness out of the hops.
 
DixeySJ said:
Annoying. If you can afford the duplication, doing the brew again with everything the same apart from the boil time might give a clue. I also noted in DH video the contribution of yeast to DMS and the value of increasing fermentation temp at the end - you might try pushing that a bit more?? Good luck ... ;)
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Been doing that already - learned most of what I know from DH lol
 
I‘m mostly doing 30min boils these days (plus gradually raising the temps near the end of fermentation), especially for ales but I haven’t tried anything lower than 60mins for lagers as I didn’t want to risk a batch.

But maybe I’ll do a smaller batch size test and see….but God how I hate pouring bad brews down the pan!
 
fgoulding said:
One other thing, I wonder if there is any relation between David Heath working for a Brewing Supplier and the fact that you need to increase the amount of bittering hops needed for shorter boil times? Just saying…:roll:
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This is a weird question.

Bittering is a chemical reaction that takes time and isn't that fast. If you want to reach the same bittering level after 30 minutes, you need to increase the amount of alpha acids, thus more hops.

Or are you implying that DH recommends shorter boil times so that the brewing supplier can sell more hops?
 
I wonder why we want to minimise the boiling time. Most of the energy goes into raising the beer to boiling and consiiderably less to keep it ticking over. Insulating the kettle might be a way forward if we're watching the Kilowatts. I see that boiling for 60 mins gives me about 95% of the bitterness I would expect for 90 mins, while a 30 minute boil will only give me about 50%. So all my bittering hops go in as FWH, I boil for an hour and then at least 10 mins more for the protofloc and any late additions. I don't see any good reason to go less than that.
I suspect there's also something about the quality of the bittering: alpha acids are a group of copounds that isomerise at different rates and I would expect a difference between a long boil with a particular weight of hops and a 30 minute boil with twice the amount of hops.
 
fgoulding said:
The latter….it’s was just a tongue in cheek comment ;)
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Many a true word said in jest. There could be an argument that phrasing 30 boils as the "modern way" and "old knowledge", could be designed to lead people to return to a highly monetize platform for 30 minute recipes videos. There's very little information or science in there to back up his claims or assertions as why recipes are still formulated to 60 or 90 minutes.
 
fgoulding said:
One other thing, I wonder if there is any relation between David Heath working for a Brewing Supplier and the fact that you need to increase the amount of bittering hops needed for shorter boil times? Just saying…:roll:
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It's not that much more.
fgoulding said:
One other thing, I wonder if there is any relation between David Heath working for a Brewing Supplier and the fact that you need to increase the amount of bittering hops needed for shorter boil times? Just saying…:roll:
Click to expand...
It's not that much more. I use TINSETH.
Screenshot_20220414-085747.png
Screenshot_20220414-085931.png
 
On the subject of DMS. A 30,60 or 90 minute boil may remove the DMS created getting to the boil. However, you can still add more via whirlpooling or cooling post boil.
 

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