I will be racking to secondary next weekend and there is a thick layer of trub/pumpkin in the bottom of primary. I will lose about 1/2 gallon. I would like to make that up in the secondary with water so I’ll have a full 5 gallons and no air space. Should I? What water should I use? I have some bottled drinking water on hand. Thanks
Bad idea in my opinion. You’d just be watering down your beer for no good reason. Not to mention risking infection (unless you boil and cool the water first). Me, I’d rather have 4.5 gallons of good beer than 5 of watered down stuff.
The headspace isn’t a concern, you only really need to worry about that sort of thing if you’re aging for a REALLY long time. Your beer will probably release enough CO2 during transfer to purge most of the oxygen out of the headspace anyway. You could always purge it yourself with CO2 if you have the means, but me I wouldn’t bother.
+1 on don’t bother filling it up. IMO, it’s better to have less good beer, than more watered down beer. Just try and keep in mind next time you’ll lose some beer, and brew more to account for it.
I think you just made the heads of the good people who produce bud light explode…that basically goes against their entire business model… :shock:
I do a pumkin ale every year and what I do now is account for that ‘Big’ Trub during the brew process. I have a 6 1/2 gallon carboy so I brew a pretty hight starting gravity beer and pour my 5 gallons of brew on top of 1 gallon of cold water in the fermenter. This year I ended up at 1.062 so if I would have skipped the water it would have been like 1.070. It is in secondary now and it looks to be about 5 gallons on the head.
