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adding water

jpaige

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After fermentation, when I racked to the bottling bucket I only had 4 gallons so I added another gallon of distilled water as it was racking. I'm thinking it should be fine. Opinions?
Thanks
 
Did you happen to boil the water before you added it to your beer? If not you risk contamination. I'm not sure how big the risk is, maybe small. I'm guessing others here will chime in on how big your risk is. Good Luck!
 
I didnt boil it, it was distilled water, the same as I added to the wort after boil to bring it up to (what I thought was) 5 gallons. It's an IPA extract recipe, steeped grains, DME, hops, dry hopped in a secondary fermenter. then added the water as it was being racked for bottling.
 
I only have 6 brews under my belt but by my second brew I learned to boil up six gallons.  I do this so by the time I'm done stealing beer for hydrometer readings, racking off the yeast cake of the primary and lastly leaving sediment from the secondary... I will have about 5 gallons.  Hope that helps.
 
Time will tell on the sanitation, but what was the gravity?  If you had a 1.050 wort that fermented out well, did you just dilute your beer by 25%? 

Sometimes it is best to take what you got and enjoy it, rather than focus too hard on the volume.  Four gallons of great beer is a good thing. 
 
I agree with Maltlicker, If you come up short you come up short.  It should still taste good, the abv may be diluted a little bit but oh well.  NExt batch you do it different.  I am sure the beer will turn out fine.  If you used distilled water you should be good contamination wise.
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. The way I looked at it was.. There was 5 gallons worth of ingredients, I just didnt add enough water before fermenting. It did ferment pretty well, I was at 6.5% before bottling. I dont remember if I took the FG reading before or after adding the water. (doh!) I was more worried about taste that alcohol level. Not that I wouldn't prefer the higher... :)
 
BTW, this is just the first of many posts ;) I have 2 more kits in the mail and am reading How to brew. It's amazing the more I read the less I know !
 
I do (or did, we will see) concentrated all grain boils and topped up all the time. I topped up with filtered water right out of the tap. I've never had a problem.

My boils were set up to be diluted though.

Of course my friends lost a kid because of contaminated water from their city so there is always a risk but that risk is there no matter what you do.
 
Well, it's been in the bottle for 2 weeks, decided to chill a bottle and give it a taste. Very little carbonation, tasted very flat and watery. I sure hope it gets better, it's looking like 2 cases of crap  :'(
 
You could try warming it up and give the bottles a swirl to stir the yeast back up.
Watery is fairly normal when young. Malt flavors tend to increase with age.
 
Two cases of valuable learning experience.  ;)

I brewed today after 2.5 months of being a non-brewer and forgot things left and right.  Still made beer though. 

If you have access to a local home brew club, that helps get one down that learning curve. 
 
jpaige said:
Well, it's been in the bottle for 2 weeks, decided to chill a bottle and give it a taste. Very little carbonation, tasted very flat and watery. I sure hope it gets better, it's looking like 2 cases of crap  :'(

oh no! I hope it will get better with the time. But I think Maltlicker's recommendation to join a club is a good idea. The more experienced brewers could find out easily where the problem is and help you. Sometimes it's a bit tricky and you need some good tips. This is also the way how I got started.
 
What temp were you storing the beer at in order to carbonate?  It should be stored at or around 70 to 73 degrees.
 
Other's should chime in here, but for clarity's sake, it probably wasn't the water addition that caused the lack of carbonation. As long as you didn't do something to destroy your yeast when bottling (and adding distilled water shouldn't do that) your yeast should eat the sugar you added and fart that CO2 we all like so much. Do the rest of you agree with me on this?
 
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