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Mrosenberg2

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I am a first time brewer and have a question for all you veterans. I think I might have miscalculated the volume of my batch of wort as It was supposed to be 5 gallons but is only half filling a carboy. My buddy who supplied the carboy insists that it is 10 gallons but after searching online the largest size of glass carboys that I could find are 6 and 6.5 gallons. This would mean that I only have around 3 gallons of wort or so fermenting. My question is, could I add enough water to bring the wort volume to 5 gallons before I bottle it? or will this affect the beer in a negative way? I just don't want to put my priming sugar into my bottling bucket and then siphon the beer into there only to realize that there is enough priming sugar for 5 gallons and there is only 3 gallons. Exploding bottles do not sound fun to me. Thanks.
 
pi*r^2*height will give you the volume of a cylinder. calculate in inches then google "x cubic inches to gallons" where x is your result.

This will be a rough estimate because you will be measuring the outside of the carboy and the thickness of the glass wall is not part of the internal volume.

You can measure to the neck of the carboy to find the carboy volume or to the top of your beer for the amount of brew you have in there.

pi ~ 3.14758 or something
 
Mrosenberg2 said:
I am a first time brewer and have a question for all you veterans. I think I might have miscalculated the volume of my batch of wort as It was supposed to be 5 gallons but is only half filling a carboy. My buddy who supplied the carboy insists that it is 10 gallons but after searching online the largest size of glass carboys that I could find are 6 and 6.5 gallons. This would mean that I only have around 3 gallons of wort or so fermenting. My question is, could I add enough water to bring the wort volume to 5 gallons before I bottle it? or will this affect the beer in a negative way? I just don't want to put my priming sugar into my bottling bucket and then siphon the beer into there only to realize that there is enough priming sugar for 5 gallons and there is only 3 gallons. Exploding bottles do not sound fun to me. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Well once it ferments, it's not wort anymore, it's beer. And you don't want to add water at that point (risk oxidation). Did you do a full 5 gal boil? or was this a partial boil? Both ways you need to add in top-off water before you pitch your yeast unless you calculated for boil lose and did a 6gallon boil. Get a hydrometer and take a gravity reading, if it's ridiculously high then you need to add top off water.
 
I did a partial 3 gallon boil and added it to 2 gallons in the fermentor, but like i said it looks like somewhere, somehow I might have been off on the volume because the carboy is just a little over half full. I'll measure the exact volume tonight though. Thanks
 
You can leave it if you want and you'll have a slightly stronger beer. If you want to add water, make sure you boil it for 10 minutes or so and then cool it to the same temp as the beer.
 
add the water to the secondary. Put the water in first and then syphon the beer in over top of that and give it a gentle stir. I took a beer brewing class a few weeks ago and the teacher talked about this situation and gave this as the solution. Boiling it ahead of this is a good idea.
 
let it be, you're fine. there aren't any 10 gallon carboys that aren't extreme specialties, so it's between 5 and 6.5. drink it strong, and drink it proud--if you want to dilute it later you can, but you can't un-dilute it :)
 
I have done this too and my beer was fine, just less of it. When I added the wort to the fermentor the foam would throw me off as to how many gallons were in there. I use a stick now and get pretty close to the 5 gallon mark.:mug:
 
Mrosenberg2 said:
Just did the math. It is a little less than 4.4 Gallons.
Click to expand...
It's a personal choice, Mrose.

I just went thru this situation a week ago with my Erdinger Weissbier clone-attempt. I was a tad shy of 4.5 gallons (target was 5 gallons). The 1/2 gallon of boiled/cooled water probably isn'g going to make *that* much of a difference in taste.
 
My first batch of beer ever was an all extract IPA and I forgot to add the top off water so I was short by about a gallon. It was still one of the best beers I'd made until this most recent APA.
 
Thanks for all the information. I am going to just let it be at just under 4 and half gallons. Because it is a little short though I think I'm going to go with carbonation drops instead of mixing in priming sugar (since all the priming sugar stuff I have read is meant for the full 5 gallons of beer). I should be bottling this Sunday so in a few weeks I'll let you guys know how it turned out. Should be kind of rugged as it was measuring at 10.5% when the wort went into the fermentor, but none the less should be a good, strong, IPA. Thanks again.
 
At 4.4 gallons you're about 7 bottles shy of a full batch. So instead of 50 you'll get 43. Definitely leave it. The risk of adding foreign fermenting bugs is not worth it after the fact. Like olllllo said, IF you were to add water after fermentation, it needs to be de-aerated.
 

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