Not enough beer to fill secondary carboy!!

Please excuse me if i missed this response somewhere I am a newbie here and to brewing and have been searching for an hour for my question.

I went thru all the steps in making my first pale ale and after primary fermentation I checked the gravity and all was good and I actually tasted the beer and it tasted great also.

My dilemma, i think, is i transferred from primary(6.5gallon bucket) to secondary (5gallon carboy) and it seems I am around .5 to 1 gallon short from the top of secondary.

What do I do? What are my options?

Thanks in advance

At this point, do nothing.
What was your actual volume into the primary fermenter?

Agreed. Done nothing.
This is part of the learning process. Learning use of water.
If you are doing extract. You can "top off" your primary next time to make sure you get your volume. That assumes you OG is high enough to handle the extra water without getting alcohol % too low at the end.

I would not worry to much about it.... Congrats on making a great Pale Ale.

I usually top up my PM/extract brews with around 1/2 gallon of water extra. It seems that when I don't the yeast layer is so thick I am about a 1/2 gallon short. Like tgrier said though, make sure you don't water it down too much though.

Definitely refrain from adding water at this point as you might cause oxidation to occur if you just pour it right in.(made that mistake once)

It's better to be 5-10 beers short on a great batch then to have more beer of lesser quality IMO.

Yeah, not much to do at this point. You'll end up with a fuller, higher abv beer so keep that in mind.

Welcome to the forums!

Did you mark your fermentor?

Usually 5 gallon fermentors are actually around 5.5 gallons in volume to the very, very top.

If this is a kit beer, it may have been formulated to make 5 gallons, which would definitely make for less than 5 gallons after racking off. I assume this is an extract beer, since it's your first.

Experienced brewers will often tweak their recipes to make 5.5 or even 6 gallons into the fermenter, at the desired original gravity and bitterness, to get 5 gallons out. However, like Frost said, better to be a little short.

And, belatedly, welcome to HBT. Glad you found it.

PseudoChef said:

Did you mark your fermentor?

Usually 5 gallon fermentors are actually around 5.5 gallons in volume to the very, very top.

Click to expand...

This is my 5 gallon carboy with about 4.75 gallons of Apfelwein. I'd say 5 gallons would be full.



Since it's filled with premeasured cartons of juice it's certainly less than 5 gallons 'cos I drank what was left.

Yeah, mine are slightly larger than that, then.



The one in the middle has/had what I would assume to be >5 gallons of mess in it. The beer alone (you can see the cherry-gunk in the bottom, which wasn't racked) was 4.75 gallons when I racked into a bottling bucket.

EDIT: you can see the 5 gallon mark in the carboy on the far right, so the cherry beer probably still had less than 5 gal in it, but not by much.

Mmmmmmmm, beer pr0n.