Well, I accidentally added too much water to the fermentation bucket on a dead ringer extract brew (my second brew). Total volume ended at about 5.5 - 5.75 gallons. My question, in order to preserve the hoppy nature of this beer I was thinking about adding 2 ounces at dry hop instead of the 1 ounce in the recipe/kit. I did check the OG and it is about 1062-1063 so at least the gravity seems about right, the target OG is 1064 according to the instructions.
Do you believe this is the right corrective action to take to overcome a potentially watered down beer or should I just let it be? Perhaps it will come out more Pale then India.
I’d let it be. Your gravity reading is suspect… it’s hard to mix all the top up water thoroughly, so you probably are lower (in extract, Gravity points have nowhere to hide). So you are probably a little lower on gravity than intended. If your hops are a little shy, at least everything’s in balance. Lower gravity/more hops changes the balance.
I see your point, I believe the top up water is well mixed because I poured the wort into the cool additional water and stirred it. My mistake was instead of adding just 2 gallons of cool water to the fermentation bucket before adding the wort I put in 2.5 gallons of water. Total water used was 5 gallons but it seems that with so much extract the volume went up quite a bit.
I would go with the one ounce of hop pellets for dry hopping since it is for aroma rather than bittering. Two ounces would give you a stronger aroma but that wouldn’t be a bad thing either. The aroma produced by hops fades before the hop bittering.
Are you sure of the volume though. Have you marked the bucket at the five gallon level by pouring in a measured five gallons of water before your first brew? Factory marks on buckets are often not correct.
Indeed your grav might be lower. At the end. But. Take a reading see what you end up. With. Think the orginal grav. Should be 1.060 i think. Let it stand bit longer one week. More. So all you yeast. Has done its work. Take a grav reading. Again see what you got. I would add one bag of cetennial hops. For more flav. But on the end it will come out fine. I think. I would start full boil. Brewing. So you end up with. 5 gall. So no need of. Adding more water. And indeed what flars. Says. Mark your fermenters. To 5 gallon
I have not marked the bucket, I was using the factory marks for reference. Each gallon is about 2.5 inches apart and my volume is about 1.75 inches above the 5 so I was estimating the total volume. Will the total volume drop after fermentation and moved to the secondary?
In full boil brewing won’t the total volume go up by the amount of extract that is added? I guess in theory a good bit of the water will vaporize and then the extract material that is suspended in the liquid will be consumed by the yeast or left in the bucket. So, in the end you should still have about 5 gallons, I am off on this?
Related question:
During boil should I keep a lid on the kettle or let most of the steam escape?
I will top off the fermentor with one-half to three-quarters of a gallon water for a 5 gallon recipe when I start with 2.5 gallons water in the boil kettle. The variable amount of top off water is due to the amount of boil off and the amount of water added with LME when LME is used in the recipe.
The most number of bottles filled for a 5 gallon brew has been 50. 600 ounces of beer out of 640 total ounces for 5 gallons. Most often it is 48 to 49 filled bottles with some slop over and 4 ounces left in the bottling bucket… I have the carboy tilted forward when siphoning. This helps to keep the siphon from getting too near the yeast/trub layer and drawing up excess yeast. I intend to leave some beer in the carboy to keep the yeast covered until harvest.
I boil with the lid mostly on the kettle. I do this to be able to reduce the amount of heat applied to the bottom of the kettle and still maintain a gentle boil. Less applied heat may reduce the amount the extract is darkened due to the Maillard Reaction. I do periodically wipe the heavy condensation from the underside of the lid. Letting this condensation drip back into the kettle can retain DMS if it does form during the boil. DMS precursors can reform during the boil with Pilsen malt extract and possibly some other extracts. (First time I noticed DMS was during the boil for a Hefeweizen.)
Ohhhh, I did indeed boil with lid on in an attempt to get to a boil quicker, that probably explains why I did not lose much volume. Will that effect the taste/end result of the beer?
Probably no bad effects. DMS is supposed to be mostly attributed to Pilsen malts. I had boiled with the lid on for years until I brewed my first Hefeweizen and noticed the corn aroma. Then I started doing some reading to find out why that aroma suddenly appeared.
Wow, this has been very educational, sounds like the best practice is to maybe start with the lid on to get the boil moving (using a electric stove top) but remove the lid totally or partially to allow the DMS to escape during the boil. A quick google on that topic gave a huge amount of hits - who would have thunk it, I noob like me wouldn’t have…
I do add about 1 gallon more hot water to the 5 gallon boil. I use a separte kettle for my steeping about 1 gall water. Once done steeping. I do add the wort to the boil kettle. End of boil end up with five gallon. Yes keep the lid bit off so the heat does escape. So you dont get mailard effect. Your wort bit dark. I do add 1/2 the lme in the beginning and 1/2 the lme about 20 min before end of boil.
After doing some reading myself it sounds like the extracting process used in making the extract should have removed some if not all of the SMM. Than there is the fact that my malt was not Pilsen gives me hope that everything is ok regarding DMS causing off flavors.
