Still curious following the last boil length xBmt comparing a Pils malt based wort boiled for 30 vs. 90 minutes, I sent some samples off to a lab for testing. The results are in!
Great info, Marshall. You’re doing good work.
just saved me some propane!
Now this data is really fantastic. Thanks!!!
Very interesting read.
How cool is that? Now I have to cut a half gallon from my sparge water and recalculate my acid additions lol
Goods stuff here!
For the upcoming Pils with Best Pils malt I will cut back the boil time. Good work Marshal.
Marshall - this is EXCELLENT.
Same here.
Its funny but even after reading it I still had that feeling of irrational doubt. Its amazing how being repeatedly told that something is out there, even if youve never seen it, can stick in your mind even after the light is turned on and you see that there’s no boogeyman.
My next two brews are pils lagers and have been adjusted to 60min boils.
I wonder how much DMS is in unboiled wort.
60 minute boils from here on out, starting with the German pils that’s coming up soon.
Also, I wonder how much SMM remains in the short-boil beer compared to the 90-minute one. In other words, does the 30-minute boil drive everything off, or does something else in the process keep the SMM from being converted to DMS later on down the line.
Another question might be, is there SMM in modern pils malt? If so is there enough to make any detectable difference?
Very, very interesting. Nice job!!
Jon, if you’re using Avangard pils for this, please report back!
I will. It’ll likely be Avangard.
You definitely still need to boil hard, with no lid. On my last cream ale, I purposely boiled weakly with the lid on, and yes I got DME. It wasn’t strong, but it’s there.
No change for me…I haven’t done a 90 min. boil in years.
I was doing a 75’ boil on Pilsner malt “just to be safe”. Haha. Now I know that I can whittle that down even more. 
EDIT: I’m not just talking about pils here, brewing in general
But maybe for a very short time. I’m just wondering how far we can go with short boil times. There are certainly work arounds for hops utilization. Hot break happens pretty fast. What else am I missing as far as boil length? Using less volume of water to sparge takes care of gravity. Many of us (Dave here is the first that comes to mind) have found that 60 minute mashes are not necessary. We have shared a lot of methods for quickly cooling the wort, and many of us (myself included) allow the wort to finish cooling the last 10 or more degrees on its own before pitching yeast.
For those of us who could brew more often if we could do it faster this is an important question: how quickly can we brew a high quality batch of beer?
There are also some snowball effects here: If we cut boil time in half for instance, our pre-boil volume will be less and it will come to a boil faster. This is very interesting to me.