Too much water

When brewing my second batch of beer, (a belgin wit) i added too much water. It called for 5-1/2 gal. finish volume and I finnished with 6 I fermented through the primary stage, (only two days, and I had moved the carboy only slightly disturbing it while still bubbling and bubbling stopped) and my gravity is now 1.018. My og was taken at wrong time so it is a void reading, will I just end up with a watered down beer, and do I still wait for gravity to be 1.012-1.010 to assume fermentation is finnished and going into conditioning.

Well, each quart of water you adds lowers your OG by 0.001. So a half gallon is 0.002. You won't notice it. That shouldn't effect your ability to get to 1.012-1.010, so you need to wait until that's reached.

theveganbrewer said:

Well, each quart of water you adds lowers your OG by 0.001. So a half gallon is 0.002. You won't notice it. That shouldn't effect your ability to get to 1.012-1.010, so you need to wait until that's reached.

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Good info thanks

thank you

beergarcia said:

thank you

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Your welcome

Was this AG or partial? Do you ever check your OG?

Well, each quart of water you adds lowers your OG by 0.001. So a half gallon is 0.002. You won't notice it. That shouldn't effect your ability to get to 1.012-1.010, so you need to wait until that's reached.

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I'm no math wiz, but this sounds REALLY off. By this math, if you DOUBLED the water on a 5 gallon batch, you are saying it would only lower the OG by 0.02 (0.001 x 20 qt)??

I think this would be more of a function of the amount of grain used and the total volume, not a flat 0.001 per quart variable, and doubling the water would change the OG by a factor of half.

Help me out here on the math??

Yea, there's no way of telling what the difference was without the OG. Use the simple C1V1=C2V2 where C (concentration) is in gravity points. Let's say the OG was 1.050- that makes C1 50, V1 5.5 gallons and V2 6 gallons. Do the math and you get 45.83333, or an actual OG of slightly less than 1.046. In any event, you shouldn't be THAT far off- you may finish at a slightly lower FG but probably not by much.

We added about a half gallon too much on our first batch, and it turned out fine.

The 1qt=0.001 was a very general term used since he didn't know the OG. If you know the numbers, this is the formula I use:

Calculating Water Addition (gravity too high)

example: 5 gallons of 1.060 wort. target gravity was 1.056

current_GU: 300gu = 60 * 5

H2O to add(quarts) = ((current_GU/target_points) - volume) * 4

1.43 qt = ((300/56) - 5) * 4

This is the formula in my beer app for lowering. Assumes you know your numbers. If this is a Wit it's somewhere around 1.050 probably. If those were the numbers, adding 1/2 gallon of water would take the wort from 1.055 to 1.051.

I've run the numbers on a bunch of OGs and this is the general take @ 5.5 gallons:

1.030- Takes 0.75qt to lower by 1.001
1.035- Takes 0.64qt to lower by 1.001
1.040- Takes 0.56qt to lower by 1.001
1.045- Takes 0.5qt to lower by 1.001
1.050- Takes 0.45qt to lower by 1.001
1.055- Takes 0.40qt to lower by 1.001
1.060- Takes 0.37qt to lower by 1.001
1.065- Takes 0.34qt to lower by 1.001
1.070- Takes 0.32qt to lower by 1.001

The numbers change slightly when dropping more than one unit.

That makes alot more sense. Thank you! nestar:nestar:nestar:

Well, the og reading was 1.060 before I added it to carboy and then added 2 gallons of water. The target og was 1.055 I believe I was close to this if I had stopped @ 5.5gal ,maybe a little higher. At any rate the reading is now 1.014 almost there.