Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
— The Witches, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
———
The boil, the fourth essential step in brewing beer, is the main event on brew day. This is where newborn wort reaches its full potential and becomes fully developed yeast food. If you brew indoors on your kitchen stove, your house fills with the heady aromas of malt and hops. If you brew outdoors on a propane burner, you find yourself drawn to the brew kettle, as if it’s some kind of mystical cauldron. And, in some ways, it is.
For, you see, magic happens during the boil. Hops yield their full complement of bitterness, flavor, and aroma. Suspended proteins that might otherwise contribute to haze clump together and drop out of solution. Heat sterilizes the wort, making it a suitable growth medium for the yeast culture to come. And volatile compounds with scary names such as dimethyl sulfide (DMS) waft away on currents of heat.
Yes, the boil is magic, indeed.
Hot Break and Boilovers
At the end of the previous chapter, you turned the heat under your wort back on to full blast. As the wort gets hot, you’ll notice a few signs that it’s about to hit the boiling point.
- A thick whitish or brownish cap of foam develops on the surface of the wort.
- This cap of foam grows and rises toward the top of the kettle.
- Brown flecks appear atop the rising cap of foam.
All of these signs are your cues to keep one hand on the burner valve and the other on a spray bottle of water, set to fine mist.
The brown cap that forms on top of the rapidly warming wort is called hot break. It’s a mishmash of proteins and sugars that has but one job: valiantly attempting to boil right the hell over the side of your boil kettle and upset your domestic partner. It is your job, as a homebrewer, to prevent it from doing so. Every one of us experiences a boilover at some point (it’s kind of like death and taxes), but you have two strategies to keep that hot break contained.
First of all, you can drop the heat. The disadvantage of this approach is that you might not be able to do so quickly enough, and that’s where the second part comes in: You can spray the hot break with a few fine mists of cold water. This cools down the hot break enough to make it fall back on itself.
Between lowering the flame and spritzing the wort with cold water, you should be able to manage the hot break. Eventually, it will settle down and fall back onto the boiling wort, forming a raft of foam that playfully dances on top.
Some instructions tell you to start your timer and begin adding hops as soon as the wort starts to boil. I recommend that you instead wait 5 minutes before you decree that the boil to be “officially” underway. This gives it an opportunity to stabilize and settle into its groove before you begin adding hops, which will only further infuriate it.
Adding Hops to Wort
Hops do several things in beer:
- They create bitterness.
- They add flavor and aroma.
- They serve as natural antimicrobials and preservatives.
- They look pretty.
Actually, only freshly plucked green hops look pretty. The rest either resemble rabbit food or those pressed flowers you used to make during your angsty youthful phase as you attempted, unsuccessfully, to woo the object of your affections. But the first three contributions are vital, and the whole point of boiling can largely be traced to these. Generally speaking, two axioms govern hops additions.
- The more you boil hops, the more bitterness you extract from them.
- The less you boil hops, the more flavor and aroma you extract from them.
Thus, in a typical 1-hour boil, hops that are added 30 to 60 minutes before the end of the boil mainly contribute bitterness. Hops added 15 to 30 minutes before you kill the heat tend to add flavor. And those added in the final 15 minutes offer mostly aroma.
These aren’t discrete windows, and in reality, every hops addition adds some bitterness, some flavor, and some aroma. Brewers manipulate the relative contributions of these qualities by adjusting the timing of the hops additions.
Hops additions are always specified in terms of the amount of time before the end of the boil. Thus, all additions can be viewed as a sort of NASA-style countdown.
- A 60-minute addition is added at T-minus 60 minutes.
- A 15-minute addition is added at T-minus 15 minutes.
- A 0-minute addition is added at liftoff, or, as brewers call it, flameout or knockout.
There are also some hops additions that are added well into the mission, usually at about T-plus 14 days or so. Brewers add so-called dry hops to beer that has already fermented to extract fresh hops aromatics. This practice is commonly observed in American IPAs and double IPAs, but virtually any style of beer can be successfully dry hopped. But more about that later.
Other Boil Additions
Hops aren’t the only thing we can add to boiling wort. In fact, anything that we’d like dissolved in our beer can go in. Other boil additions include the following:
- Spices: From anise and coriander to orange peel and spruce tips, there’s no end to the botanical flavorings you can lend to your beers. Most spices are added in the last five minutes of the boil to preserve their delicate aromatic compounds.
- Fruits: Name any fruit you can think of, and there’s a good chance it has found its way into a beer. Fruit may be added at various times during the brewing process, including the boil. If added to the boil, it’s best added at the end.
- Lactose: Lactose is milk sugar, and brewer’s yeast can’t ferment it. Adding it to the boil in the last 10 minutes will slightly sweeten your homebrew. It’s most commonly used for milk stouts.
- Kettle finings: Kettle finings, the most common of which include Irish moss (above middle) and Whirlfloc (above left), are products that enhance beer clarity. Add them in the final 10 minutes of the boil to promote clearer beer down the road.
- Yeast nutrients: Malt-based wort is an excellent source of nutrients for brewer’s yeast, and it only makes sense: We’ve bred the yeast to thrive in it. However, wort that includes a large amount of unmalted adjuncts may benefit from a small addition of nutrients (above right). They’re available at your homebrew retailer and are best added in the last 5 minutes of the boil.
Cooling and Cold Break
When you kill the heat to your boil kettle, you officially enter what’s known as the cold side of brewing. Up to and including the boil, you don’t need to sanitize because the boil does it for you. The minute you remove heat, though, everything that touches your wort must be sanitized.
Immediately after the boil, we rapidly cool the wort from the boiling point down to the temperature at which we intend to ferment our beer, typically 60–70°F (16–21°C) for ales or 45–55°F (7–13°C) for lagers. Many brewers use an immersion wort chiller, which is a specialized piece of equipment that quickly cools wort.
If you don’t have an immersion wort chiller, or if your brew kettle is too small to accommodate one, an ice bath is the next best thing. Just fill your kitchen sink or a large tub with cold tap water and ice cubes or cold gel packs. Cover your brew kettle when you shut off the heat to steam sanitize the lid and then place the whole thing in the ice bath, taking care that the water level doesn’t rise too far and seep into your wort under the lid. Leave the brew pot in the cold bath for as long as is necessary to cool it to fermentation temperature.
No matter your cooling method, one thing you may or may not witness is the so-called cold break. Extract-based wort tends to produce less of this stuff than does wort freshly prepared from malted barley kernels, but it can show up in any beer. Cold break is the name for the coagulated proteins that clump together and give your wort an appearance not unlike miso soup or egg drop soup (above left). It’s fascinating to watch, and I always feel particularly accomplished when my wort produces a strong cold break. Truth be told, though, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about it. It just is.
Some brewers like to allow the cold break to precipitate to the bottom of the boil kettle so that they can gingerly siphon ultra-clear wort from around it. You’ll probably run across the term whirlpooling here and there, which just means stirring the wort vigorously (with a sanitized spoon) and then allowing it to settle: the cold break and other debris then naturally form a compact cone right in the middle of the bottom of the kettle, which makes it easy to leave all that stuff behind.
I rarely go to such lengths. In most cases, I just pour the cooled wort, cold break and all, right into the fermentor, through a sanitized strainer to keep hops material out. The cold break actually contains some nutrients that benefit yeast health, and if you ferment in a clear container such as a carboy, it is a magical experience to watch the cold break proteins swirl around at the height of fermentation.
It’s your call. If the cold break bothers you, then by all means, let it settle out. Otherwise, just accept it and move on: a little cold break isn’t going to make or break your beer. You’ll rack your beer off the cold break after fermentation anyway, so it’s just a question of whether you get it out of the way now or later.
Checking Gravity
With your freshly prepared wort happily cooled down to room temperature or so, it’s almost time to add yeast and start fermentation. But before you do, there’s one piece of housekeeping that, like making the bed, is easy to forget when you’re in a hurry. But it’s a good habit to get into, and that’s taking a specific gravity reading.
Specific gravity is an expression of how much dissolved sugar is available in wort for yeast to convert to alcohol and carbon dioxide. Your first specific gravity reading is the original gravity. As fermentation proceeds, the specific gravity (which is a ratio of a substance’s density to that of water) progressively decreases until it bottoms out at final gravity, a measure of density of the finished beer.
Taking an original gravity reading tells you where your beer starts. It’s a bit like taking a compass bearing to figure out where you are. Only by knowing where you start can you possibly hope to guess where you’ll end up (my, that’s philosophical!). Taking an original gravity reading is as simple as pulling a sample of wort using a thief (right) and plopping a hydrometer down into the sample. Let it settle and then read the liquid level off the scale printed on the side of the hydrometer. If you ferment in a bucket, you can even just float the sanitized hydrometer directly in the wort.
As fermentation progresses, you can take gravity readings along the way to see how far your beer has come. Let’s consider a fairly basic American pale ale. A typical progression for specific gravity might go like this:
Brew day (BD): Original gravity 1.055
BD+1: Gravity reading 1.055
BD+2: Gravity reading 1.050
BD+3: Gravity reading 1.040
BD+4: Gravity reading 1.030
BD+5: Gravity reading 1.025
BD+6: Gravity reading 1.020
BD+7: Gravity reading 1.015
BD+8: Gravity reading 1.013
BD+9: Gravity reading 1.012
BD+10: Gravity reading 1.011
BD+11: Gravity reading 1.011
BD+12: Gravity reading 1.011
This progression is purely hypothetical, but it demonstrates how specific gravity falls as wort ferments into beer. And when that specific gravity finally settles at a stable number, in this case 1.011, we call that final number the final gravity. But only by knowing your initial, or original, gravity, can you reliably track the progress of your beer.
With a gravity reading in hand, you’re ready to move on to the main event: fermentation, where wort becomes beer. 
Moving On
Everything up to and including the boil is done in preparation for the moment to come: pitching yeast. With the boil behind us, we enter the cold side in earnest and must pay careful attention to sanitation. But our efforts will be rewarded with the best beer possible.
This is an excerpt from our Illustrated Guide to Homebrewing by Dave Carpenter. Want to read the whole thing? Download it here.