Creating your own boiling schemeUpdated 2 days ago

Why boil your wort?

After the mashing process, the wort has to be boiled. Boiling affects the following topics:

• Wort sterilisation;
• Enzyme inactivation;
• Coagulation of proteins (hot break formation);
• Evaporation of water;
• Removal of undesired volatiles;
• Formation of aromatic and colouring compounds.

A more in depth breakdown of these topics can be found in the article "In depth breakdown of boiling''. When creating your own boiling scheme you will be able to change the duration aswell as the type and amount of hops/adjuncts.

Boiling duration

The minimum boiling time is 15 minutes. During this time, the enzymes from malt are inactivated, hot break forms and the wort is sterilised. When no or only 0-min hops are used, the minimum boiling time can be used.

Longer boiling times result in increased evaporation and removal of undesired volatiles, increased formation of colouring compounds and increased hop utilisation (increased bitterness). 
The wort fermentability is not affected by boiling time. 
The head retention of the final beer somewhat decreases. 
A boiling time of 60 min is often used, because it ensures sufficient hop utilisation, removal of undesired volatiles and formation of colour for most beers.

Below you can see a few examples of boiling schemes:

As you can see a longer boil (>60 minutes) with hop additions at the start will result in more bitterness extraction from the hops. That's why it is typically used for dark and high gravity beers.
If the desire is to get very little bitterness extraction, for example for New England IPA's, a short boiling time can be used, as the hops will give less bitterness extraction this way.

Pick the hops

Hops are automatically added by the hop carousel during boiling, you only have to decide which hops to pick and when you want them to be added.

There are bitter and aromatic hops, where the biggest difference is the bitter hops having a high alpha-acid percentage (the more acids, the more bitter the endproduct). 

The duration indicates the amount of time the hop will be inside the kettle. So 60 minutes of boiling the magnum hops would mean it is added at the start of boiling. 
The longest duration hop will be added first and hence should be placed in carousel compartment 

It is also possible to add other ingredients such as orange peel, cardamom, coriander seed etc. they can be added by selecting the OTHER INGREDIENT button.