Lately I've been doing some very large boils -- 7 gallons in a 7.5 gallon kettle. To prevent boilovers, I've been using Fermcap-s. It's great, and I've had no boilover problems, but I have no idea how Fermcap works or what's in it. What is this stuff? Other than preventing boilover and excessive kreusen, does it have any effect on my beer?
I've heard that adding cleaned pennies to the wort can help prevent boil-overs. I guess they could provide nucleation points- I dunno. Any truth to this, or is it just an old wives' tail?
I recently was brewing a 1 gallon kit from Northern Brewer (The White House Honey Ale kit) and instantly after adding the first packet of hops, the entire kettle boiled over. Absolutely instantly, there's nothing I could do to stop it. I estimate I lost about 1/2 to 1 cup of water and up to 1/4th of my first hops packet (there were no issues when I added the second one later in the brew.) I asked the Northern brewer …
Brewed my very first batch today. It is a stout and is sitting in my basement as I type. I would call the day a success--a whole lot more work than I thought. Hopefully only two things went wrong: I had a little bit of a boil over when we were still trying to get a handle on how to control the turkey fryer heat. I broke my hydrometer. In your opinions, how serious are these issues? Anything I need …
Besides forcing me to clean a lot more stuff than I would generally do, will a boil over harm my beer? I suppose I will loose a lot of the break material and according to brewstrong the break material has proteins vital for head retention, so I would probably have issues with that. Any others?
This is a shill question for Mark Taylor. I stumbled on his great tip about keeping a spray bottle on hand to prevent boil-overs while looking for advice on yeast re-use. The spray bottle worked amazingly well. Ample room in the boil pot is pretty obvious. What other strategies are there?
I love FermCap for controlling boilovers. I add a few drops (less than recommended) as the wort comes up to boiling. It allows me to do other things during the boil to shorten my brew day. Here's what I'm wondering: The directions say to add a drop per gallon at the "start of fermentation". Does my boil addition count for that? Can I just add the recommended amount for my final volume to the boil and trust that all of …
I've been doing it lately, assuming it will reduce the amount of crap I have to filter out after the boil, and it seems to reduce the amount of head I get during the boil (less chance of a boil over). Does anybody else do this or does anybody have any insight as to whether or not I should be doing it and why?