Adding Cold Water to Wort...Big Mistake?

I brewed my first batch of beer in over 10 years yesterday. I basically had a kit with all the ingredients and a set of instructions. I followed them exactly and that might be my problem. After I cooled the wort, I transferred it into a 6.5 gallon glass carboy. Since it wasn't a full boil I needed to add water to bring it to 5 gallons. The instructions just said "Add cold water until you reach 5 gallons". They did not say "Add cold water that previously was boiled until you reach 5 gallons"....So basically I just added cold water from the tap...and now I am thinking I might have ruined 5 gallons of beer.

Thoughts?

Thanks so much!
Dan

Your beer will be fine, many people top off with their tap water without boiling it first. As long as you don't have nasty tap water you will be fine.

You are my new best friend! Its been so long since I made beer and I couldn't find any of my books (I will find them when I don't need them) so was just going by the recipe instructions.

This is also the first time for me making it on an electric stove. My stove could hardly keep 3.5 gallons boiling and it took forever to get there. Would it be safe to bring it down to say 2 gallons (thus having to add more cold water before pitching?).

Thanks again!

it works all the same. some will boil and cool, others will top off with ice, some will top off with tap water.

you will have beer and you shouldn't get any off flavors

I had been adding 3gallons of almost frozen bottled water ($.59each) to my 2g wort. After some research I found my town has great water, so I started adding straight from the tap.

If you have high chlorine or chloramine levels, you may have an issue with off-flavors. Boiling would have removed the chlorine, but not the chloramine (if you have that, you can use campden tablets).

That being said, it will probably turn out fine. If your sanitation was good and you pitched adequate yeast, I would not worry about infection.

This is probably a stupid question but why is everything when brewing beer: sanitize, sanitize, sanitize, and just in case...sanitize again. But then at the end it is ok to add plain tap water?

prenger745 said:

This is probably a stupid question but why is everything when brewing beer: sanitize, sanitize, sanitize, and just in case...sanitize again. But then at the end it is ok to add plain tap water?

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You still take some risk just adding tap water. Depending on the source, say with city water, it's been processed and has to meet certain water quality standards for bacteria, so you can be pretty confident it's sanitary. Well water might have an increased chance of bacteria, but who knows. Like I said there's risk of infection but it's probably minimal. Of course if you have a nasty faucet the water is coming out of, then that changes things.

I want to thank everyone for all the advice! I have a lot to learn but this is fun, not fall asleep at the desk, learning

I am pretty confident that my water is fine. It tastes really good right out of the tap and the yearly water reports I get, show that the water is very safe as well! The carboy is down in my dark, even temperature basement doing its thing. I guess I will know in 4 weeks or so.

Either way, it was fun to do this again and I am going to make this a more regular thing.

prenger745 said:

This is probably a stupid question but why is everything when brewing beer: sanitize, sanitize, sanitize, and just in case...sanitize again. But then at the end it is ok to add plain tap water?

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Do you live in a city that is currently having a boil water advisory? Have we been so brainwashed from buying little plastic bottles of overpriced water (that may have ALSO come out of a tap, and MAY have less governement regulations than our municipal water) that we have forgotten that that sink in our kitchen isn't JUST used to wash dishes with? I have always found this fear that folks have of their own water ridiculous. If you can drink your water you can brew with it (all arguments about chlorimines aside, I'm talking about sanitization.) If you can drink the water out of your tap without getting sick, you can top off your fermenter with it. I've done it all my brewing career and NEVER had any issues.

I've just found this blind trust people have over those tiny plastic bottles over our own home water is ludicrious....

Let's start with an independent four year study of the bottled water industry, completed in 1999 by the Natural Resources Defense Council.1 The report of the results along with a petition to the FDA stated that there were "major gaps in bottled water regulation and that bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water". The study's principal findings were that although most bottled water seems good quality, "some bottled water contains bacterial contaminants, and several brands of bottled water contain synthetic organic chemicals (such as industrial solvents, chemicals from plastic, or trihalomethanes - the by-products of the chemical reaction between chlorine and organic matter in water) or inorganic contaminants (such as arsenic, a known carcinogen) in at least some bottles".

.........

This leads us to the subject of the chlorination of our public drinking water in the USA. This law is in effect to sterilize and disinfect the water, eradicating all types of bacteria.

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According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which is a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting health and the environment, more than 25% of all bottled water comes from a public source. That's right - it's the same water that's piped to homes and businesses.

How can that happen? Because they can. No one is demanding truth in advertising from water bottling companies!

Standards for purity exist, of course. BUT ...Bottled water purity is regulated by the FDA, and because the FDA puts low priority on water, bottlers are inspected and tested less than once a year. According to one FDA official, it's the manufacturer's responsibility to ensure that the product complies with laws and regulations.

The result: Some do, and some don't. And even worse, if the water is bottled and delivered within the same state, there are NO regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates tap water, so if a bottler uses a public source that has passed their inspection, it should be OK to drink - right? Not necessarily.

In tests done by the NRDC, at least one sample from a third of the brands contained bacterial or chemical contaminants, including carcinogens in levels exceeding state or industry standards. Not to be argumentative, but I have to wonder why any level of carcinogens is OK.

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My understanding is that our municipal water sources are tested several times a day. That's how they are able to have a boil water declaration if something is detected.

With such poor sanitation and brewing practices what you should do is let it ferment for three weeks in primary, then bottle it. Then you should send the entire batch to me to properly test and dispose of the contaminated materials.

I'll even give you a break off my normal testing fees. Just ship it to me and I will do several tests to see what your beer has in it, for free. I will also send you a detailed report. In the off chance that the beer is not contaminated I will return what beer remains after extensive testing(generally less than a 6-pack, often none, from two cases)

PM me for address when you are shipping.

In all seriousness it will be fine. I do it all the time. I even did it yesterday when I boiled off too much on my all-grain batch. I have never had a contaminated batch.

I seriously plan on toping off on my next batch instead of boiling the entire 5 gallons. I had a helluva time cooling the entire batch down with no chiller. I agree with these guys, you'll be fine and most of us have/will do it at some point in our brewing careers.

From what I understand, when you boil water, you deplete some of its oxygen, which seems counter-productive to what the yeast requires. Since distilled water is boiled, I guess the same thing would apply. I have been using water from the tap, so far with success. Maybe a good idea to spray sanitizer on the faucet.

PIGMAN said:

From what I understand, when you boil water, you deplete some of its oxygen, which seems counter-productive to what the yeast requires. Since distilled water is boiled, I guess the same thing would apply. I have been using water from the tap, so far with success. Maybe a good idea to spray sanitizer on the faucet.

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That's why you aerate the wort before pitching yeast.

prenger745 said:

Would it be safe to bring it down to say 2 gallons (thus having to add more cold water before pitching?).

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It's absolutely safe, but you MIGHT want to consider downloading some brewing software like Beersmith, plug in your recipe, and play around with the boil size to see what it says. You'll get less hop utilization with a smaller boil, so in theory you need to add more hops. Depending on how serious you are, it's probably not a big deal, and some claim that the effect of boil size on hop utilization is overblown. Just something to think about.

frodo said:

Of course if you have a nasty faucet the water is coming out of, then that changes things.

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I have been using a soak&rinse sanitizer, and what I do to make doubly sure this isn't a problem is I use the kitchen sprayer and let it sit in the sanitizing solution when I am not using it. When I need top-off water, I take it out of the solution, purge anything that might still be in the hose, and go to it. Makes me rest easier in terms of my water getting contaminated as it comes out of the tap.

I'm about to switch to Starsan, though, so I'm not sure how well that technique translates...

For good measure I soak the facet head in no rinse sanitizer before using the tap. I trust the water, just not the final pipes.