Mine varies. If its 90º out and 30% humidity with no wind blowing on my flame I boils off quicker than when its 23º and getting ready to snow with a 30 mph wind. But generally I go from 7.5 gallons to 6 in an hour. Thats about 20% I think, and ought to be plenty good.
2 what? What’s a yute?
“I’m sorry… YOUTHS”. Bad movie reference.
Gallo? Jerry Gallow is dead. I’m Jerry Callo
That would be a fun test. How cool would it be if the only way to get DMS is to add it to the finished beer?
Another fun test would be to take the beer that was found to have no DMS and serve it triangle style, all three being tge same beer, to BJCP judges with these instructions. “Which of the 3 has DMS?” correct answer being none of the 3.
I have always commented “no DMS” when judging (because I don’t find it except in the rarest situations), but maybe it is superfluous for judging comments…
My Cousin Vinnie quotes aside, this is good news and a good thread. Thanks for your good work, Marshall!
In this case, I’d wager that boiloff rate is a more accurate marker than absolute boiloff (i.e., gallons/hour). 8 gallons of wort is going to have twice as much SMM as 4 gallons of wort. If you’re losing 1 gallon/hour in each, I’m thinking that the 4-gallon batch will blow off all its SMM about twice as fast as the 8-gallon batch.
Of course, the chemistry is likely much more complex. Things like this are rarely perfectly linear.
It’s something you really don’t need to mention unless a) it’s there, or b) it’s not unusual to find it in the style. So, if you’re drinking some sort of light american lager or pre-prohibition pilsner and don’t detect any, it would be appropriate to mention it.
I do the same with diacetyl - of course that I frequently find in abundance!
I’m so glad you all found this information interesting. I have plans to send off more samples of different xBmt beers for lab testing, should be pretty fascinating!
When I first started this xBmt series, I felt a similar sense of doubt. Having brewed so many beers that should have been f##ked up yet weren’t is certainly decreasing my trepidation. But yeah, old habits die hard.
So do I! I was chatting with someone yesterday who was actually at MBAA and struck up a conversation with the folks from Weyermann about this data. Really curious to hear about that!
I’ve been doing this for the last couple years without issue, so I’ll be boiling for even less from here on out 
I’m pretty sure it’s there, at least based on the preliminary info my contact got from Weyermann, I just think it volatizes much quicker than we conventionally believed… like, before the wort even reaches a boil.
I’m not convinced we definitely need to boil all that hard… xBmts to come!
Cream Ale traditionally has a charge of flaked maize, sure it wasn’t that you were picking up?
Cheers to your humility!
Of course it exists, though I’m becoming more and more convinced what most beer evaluators/judges think is DMS probably isn’t. That’s not to bash judges, I am one after all, it’s just that we often find what we are looking for. I think it’s humbling and generally noble to constantly doubt what we think we know.
We definitely plan to start doing this kind of stuff, just gotta knock out a few more single variables first. Also, despite the common reference, I don’t view myself as a mythbuster at all, in fact the impetus for starting his series, perhaps surprisingly, was to demonstrate how important certain variables were. I expected to make much more s***ty beer than I have.
I alluded to it in a previous comment, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I’m not convinced judges, when they comment on off flavors, are always really picking it up. Sure, there may be a few instances where it’s super obvious, but I think certain ingredients sometimes give the impression of something that, since the judge is focused on it, gets misinterpreted as an off flavor. Hope that doesn’t come across as too cynical…
i did 60 minute boil on my german pils 13 days ago. samples taste great-no hints of DMS detected.
fast ferment also-clean as whistle.
Very possible. I guess I hadn’t even considered that but it may be the truth.
I’m out there on the limb right there with you. There’s a few excellent judges out there. There’s thousands of judges who are wrong more often than they are right. And then of course, every single one of them is human. It’s not cynical. It’s true!
I don’t know. I make a cream ale with flaked maize and the corn gives it a slight sweetness, but I don’t get DMS from it. It’s a pretty clean beer.
I think the same thing with diacetyl. There are certain caramel-aromas that many people detect as butterscotch and automatically go to “diacetyl”. DMS and diacetyl are the boogeyman with some judges. They’re expecting them to be hiding under the bed, so they think they see them all the time.
His point was more that some people smell ‘corn’ and think ‘DMS’ when it may literally be corn.
I misread, Toby… That could well be the case.
It seems to me that BJCP judging is designed to work best in a specific setting, that being the comparison of a beer to that beer’s BJCP style guide. The farther you stretch it from that setting the less effective it is. Try giving a panel of judges 3 or 4 commercial examples and have them guess the sub category they belong in. Odds are they might get one right. Because its not designed to work that way.
Most judges, I think, are pretty good at tasting and explaining what they taste. Most know the basic off flavors. The trouble comes when its time to give suggested remedies to the off flavors. If a subtle flavor is misinterpreted as an off flavor, then a suggestion is given which the brewer already does… ooops. Example, corn flavor from corn in the recipe, interpreted as DMS, then suggestion given to not cover the boil, but the brewer already doesn’t cover… results in “judges suck”. One mistake, leads to another, leads to all of us being judged.
hence why in writing your feedback, you should never assume anything. write " if you used a lot of pils malt and covered the boil, try not covering… etc"
there’s ways to say things that don’t make the recipient defensive or make yourself sound omnipotent.
There are corn aromas that are not creamed corn/DMS aroma. I always shake my head when I get a comment on a CAP or Cream Ale saying DMS from corm, when it just smells like corn and has that corn sweetness. Does anyone get DMS from a corn tortilla shell?