No rolling boil - Did I kill my American Pale Ale?

Hello - this is my first post on the boards.

For Christmas I got one of those Mr. Beer brew kits, and my first extract brew was a Canadian Draft. Wow - that turned out terrible. I'm not sure if it was a collection of mistakes on my part or quality of ingredients, but I could barely drink that "brew".

After that I decided to go to the local homebrew store (Keystone Home Brew) and pick up an Irish Stout extract. I used my Mr. Beer fermented and just divided the ingredients to make 2 gallons instead of 5. This beer turned out amazing. I made a few batches this way and each one was outstanding.

Last week I decided to up my batches to 5 gallons and try some new techniques. I bought a kit from Keystone Home Brew (crushed gains, malt, hops, liquid yeast) I was able to get the rest of the supplies from my dad's old brew collection (larger fermenter/airlock/auto siphon). - as a side note would this still be considered an extract brew because I used 3lbs of malt? I'm still new with all of the terms.

Anyway, on to how I may have ruined the beer. I had a stock pot to 'boil' my wort, but I noticed it said "don't use on glass cook top" so I used a GE hot plate because I didn't want my wife to kill me when I ruined her stove. Well - this was fine for steeping the grains because it never got to a boil, but when I got to the boiling wort step I was never able to get a rolling boil. The wort produced some steam and was very warm, but I never got a rolling boil out of it.

The beer has been fermenting for a week and tonight or tomorrow should be ready for bottling. I'm going to follow through with the beer, but do you think the lack of rolling boiling ruined it? Or will the flavors just be more subdued and I wasted a good $50 on nice supplies? I did a hydrometer reading before I pitched the yeast and the estimated ABV after fermentation would be around 6.

Thanks for the help in advance. I guess all of these mistakes will make me stronger in the end...or provide me an endless supply of lousy beer.

-Josh

The point of boiling is to release the alpha acids (bascially what bitters the beer) from the hops. I'm not sure if any will be release, or if it will just be less, but either way you will end up with a much sweeter beer then you were intending.

If you used a can yes, it is considered an extract.

Although it seems that most fermentation will happen within a couple of days, you don't want to rush the fermentation...up to three weeks will do no harm to the brew, it can only help. The best way to determine if the beer is ready is to take hydrometer readings and determine if your beer has gone to completation. I am assuming that your SG was about 1.045 and your FG should be about 1.010-1.012. What was your SG? If you are not sure what a hydrometer does, go to howtobrew.com and read up on it. For a beginner like you and me, it was a great place to start and it answered a ton of my questions.

The starting gravity should have been 1.056 and final hopefully 1.014.

The recipe looked like this:
6lb Munton & Fison Extra Light Dried Malt Extract
1/2lb Briess Crystal Malt 20L
1/2lb Munton & Fison Carapils Malt 20lb
2oz Perle Hop Pellets (Bittering)
1oz Cascade Hop (Flavoring)
1oz Cascade Hop (Finishing)
Wyeast #1056 XL American Ale Yeast

What you have got there is a pale ale that won't be very bitter, but may have some exeptional hop aroma. It probably will be much sweeter than you would like, but it will be beer, and may not be that bad. Beliner Weiss historically was not boiled.

if you haven't bottled yet, you could possibly boil a small hop tea to extract some bitterness and add it to the beer. I'm not sure of the formula or if it's even worth it, jus a thought

Thanks for all of the help. I'm planning on bottling tomorrow - i'll do some tests and see where my levels are. The hop-tea idea is a great one, unfortunately my homebrew store has a "new hop policy" and I don't think I'll be able to get any extra.

How many days did you leave it in the primary? From your first post I would guess 9-10 days?

I primary 14 to 24 days with any beer I brew. You need time on the yeast for conditioning.

The beer went into the fermenter on the 4th of May, so I guess that puts me at about 10 days now. On Monday the fermentation seemed to have all but stopped. So, it's ok to have it sit until Sunday with minimal fermentation?

I was watching some show on the discovery channel about one of those larger breweries (I forget which one) but they said they only ferment for 3 days or something ridiculous like that. They did have Greg Koch (Stone Brewing) on the show - he seems like a guy who really loves his beer.

Bitterness extraction and isomerization only requires the wort to be hot. This means it also happens when the wort is not boiling (hot whirlpool is one example). But what I would be more afraid of in this case, is the volatilization of aromatic compounds like DMS. Even though this was an extract boil, which uses extract that has already been boiled a little, it still needs a sufficient boil-off to reduce the DMS level below a threshold.

There are 5 “-ations” that need to happen during the boil:

- evaporation -> removes water and increases your gravity a little. No harm done if that doesn’t happen as much

- sanitation -> kill the bugs that are in the wort. This should have happened even without a rolling boil as long as the temp was close to boiling temps

- coagulation -> coagulate and clump up proteins. If that doesn’t happen properly, which most likely didn’t happen, you will get a hazy beer

- isomerization -> makes the bittering resins of the hops water soluble. This happens even without a rolling boil. Commercial brewers account for isomerization that happens in the whirlpool. They may also use a boiling system where the 1st stage of the boil is done at a simmer to save energy.

- volatilization -> drive of unwanted aroma compounds. This is mainly DMS which gives the beer a cooked corn or vegetable aroma. At least the last part of the boil needs to be done vigorous enough to drive off DMS to a point that it cannot be noticed in the beer. This may not have happened sufficiently in your case

If this was an AG beer, I’d say you will get a murky lower gravity beer that smells like corn. But your saving grace might be that it was extract based and that the production of the extract already did the necessary boiling for you.

Let us know how it turns out. I’m in particular interested in the bitterness level of the beer and if it was actually significantly less than what you would get from a rolling boil.

Kai

Thanks for all of the help and advice. I bottled over the weekend (about 14 days of fermentation) and now it's time to wait and condition and see what comes of this. My final gravity was 1.010 (slightly lower than what I was aiming for). I tasted a sample and it definitely isn't bitter. I can notice a subtle hop flavor but nothing intense. I'll give an update after a few weeks of conditioning.

Just for future reference I have used my stockpot on the glass stove top for all of my brews so far. I have had up to 8 gallons boiling at one time. You will run into a little lag time in getting to a because the glass top stoves have a regulator that cuts the burner on and off again. What I have done to combat this annoyance is to straddle my stock pot over the front and back burner and set it so that at least one burner is always on while the other cycles off and on. As long as you are careful and not slinging your full pot of wort around you are unlikely to wreck the stove.

Just FYI, craft breweries can ferment their beers faster because they control the conditions. They can use yeast pitching rates that would make a homebrew over-heat, but their fermenters have active cooling systems.

And your recipe would be classified as extract with steeped specialty grains.

Quick update on the brew!

This Friday will be 3 week of bottle conditioning, and the beer is starting to take on delicious flavors. I've been taking samples every 5 days just to chart the progression, and last night was the first time I was able to actually enjoy the beer. I suppose it is still young, but I can definitely taste a difference.

At this point the beer is not very bitter at all. It's not terribly sweet, but definitely not the Pale Ale bitter that I was originally shooting for. I was also expecting that off vegetable flavor Kasier suggested, but so far none of that has showed up. The beer is slightly murky, but I suppose that could be because it is still young.

All of the flavors in general are very subtle, but I have noticed a maturation in flavor over these two and a half weeks. So all in all it's not what I was hoping for, but it turned out to be delicious anyway. Is there a name for a non-bitter pale ale other than "a mistake"? I'm not sure how to classify it, but I won't have a problem finishing off these 5 gallons. A nice simple summer beer good for kicking back a few.

I've purchased some new equipment, so hopefully my second non-mr.beer brew will turn out even better. Maybe I'll head to the LHBS Friday to pick out some ingredients. Not sure what to make next.

Dredging this one up once again after another month of sitting.

Now about 7 or 8 weeks of sitting in the bottle this beer is wonderful. It had a sweetness about it before that was bearable, but not the flavor I was looking for. Now that sweetness has mellowed out and I can finally taste the hops and subtle malt flavors.

Definitely not a complex beer, but one that has mellowed out and aged well. I wish I had more than 6 bottles left. I guess I learned the lesson about patience and letting the beer do its thing. That and it really is hard to mess up a beer - looks like time helped this one.

cool, it looks like everything turned out fine. It really is rather difficult to kill beer.

Congrats!

Get yourself a propane burner for your future 5 gallon boils. They're cheap and it will save you a lot of time and frustration on brew day. Here's a cheap one from home depot.

http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs...langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100056313