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Top-up water

scottk1969

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Has anyone ever added top-up water after secondary fermentation, just prior to kegging (boiled and cooled, obviously)?  Are there any speedbumps I should be aware of?

Scott K.

Magic Hat #9 in the keg
Dogfish 60 (sort of) in secondary
 
All the big boys do this.  They brew a high gravity beer, and then dilute at packaging time to make the light yellow, stuff.

You want to make sure your water is oxygen free.  Boiled and cooled is a good way to do this. But, when you transfer from the kettle to store the water use standard transfer practices to avoid mixing O2 into the water.  Blanket with CO2, fill from the bottom, etc...

Remember you will dilute everything in the beer, hops, alcohol, malt flavors, and minerals like chloride, sulfate, and pH.  You can compensate the minerals and pH by adding minerals and acid to your boil water to match your beer. 
 
I've never heard a treatise describing WHY they do it.  But, JZ, Palmer, Charlie Bamforth have all said its the standard practice for the mass produced light american lagers---BMC beer. 

For the homebrewer its just one more tool to play around with your beer.  Mike McDole (Tasty on TBN) brews 1.070+ beers and then will dilute some of it depending on what he wants to serve.  So he can brew one big beer, and serve 2-4 different beers from the same keg if he keeps a keg of carbonated water around. 

There are other possibilities too.  You can change the mineral profile of the final beer...particularly the sulfate or chloride.  In this way you could alter the flavor profile on a beer by beer basis.  This is probably more of an experimental approach for finding the ideal profile for that recipe, though.
 
awesome post learned a lot there tom thanks. and Scott yeungling is the only beer for steamed crabs and i dont really even go for many lagers
 
tom_hampton said:
All the big boys do this.  They brew a high gravity beer, and then dilute at packaging time to make the light yellow, stuff.


........to make the [watered down] light yellow, stuff. 

Seems clear they do it to get more [watered down] beer from each production cycle, right?  Watered down, less flavorful beer appeals to a much larger population, so more sales.
 
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