Accidentally watered down a barleywine, snow what?

Brewed a barleywine yesterday. First chance to try my new burner & larger kettle. Brewing went fine.

Near the end of chilling, however, I discovered that my wort chiller had developed a slow leak where the hose connects with the chiller. Not enough to squirt water, but enough so that it slowly leaked water down the copper tubing and into my brewpot. Wasn't visible to the eye unless you grabbed it there.

The result? I accidentally ADDED water during the chilling process. Six gallons went into my fermenter instead of five. An OG of 1.062, far lower than it should be.

ugh.

I'm considering adding a cup of brown sugar today and another tomorrow to boost the fermentables. I happened to have hopped it over what the recipe called for, adding an extra ounce of Kent Golding, .25 oz every ten minutes for the middle 40 of the boil, so my hope is that since it's already extra bitter it'll balance okay with the extra sugar.

Good idea? Bad? Anything I should know or keep in mind?

(The beer is fermenting nicely, incidentally. I pitched yesterday at about 5:30 EST. It's now 1:20. Blowoff tube is actively spitting stuff out.)

Don't add sugar... it will never be a barley wine now but that's ok, it doesn't mean it won't be good.

It sounds like you've made a decent west coast pale or the lower end of the IPA. No worries there.

The only thing I would be concerned with is an infection stemming from the water leaking into the boil kettle. A lot of wild yeast cells live in tap water. Just make sure your pure strain takes off with minimal lag time, and so long as the yeast you pitch is the big bug on the block it should start budding daughter cells and flocculating before any wild yeast has a chance to take off. Hopefully since you were intending to brew a barley wine you've done a yeast starter, and active yeast was inoculated into the wort.

Honestly you should be fine, and it might turn out you like your creation enough to brew it as an IPA down the road.

A little worried about infection, but it got off to a quick start, fermentation looks healthy, and smells good ... so I think I dodged that bullet.

Shoegaze99 said:

A little worried about infection, but it got off to a quick start, fermentation looks healthy, and smells good ... so I think I dodged that bullet.

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You wouldn't know if it was infected for weeks. Infections start with relatively few cells so it takes awhile for them to establish their population. Having said that, people use top off water all the time with little consequence. If wild yeast or bacteria content in the water was an issue, this wouldn't be such common practice.

This sounds a little crazy but what about getting 12 pounds of dme, and making up a 4 gallon batch of wort, then combine them and split them into 2 5 gallon fermenters?

Your 6 gallons of 1.062 wort, combined with 4 gallons of 1.132 wort becomes 10 gallons of 1.090 wort.

What was the og of your barleywine supposed to be? If the barlewine wa ssupposed to be lower, then use less.

10 pounds of extract makes the og of the 10 gallons at 1.081
8 pounds makes it 1.072

You may want to run some numbers in software and figure out IBUs you might want to hop it at. Or just go with it unhopped but depending on your bitterness it might be too sweet.

So a quick update. Took a reading today to be sure the yeast had pushed through okay. Had two days of strong activity and then nothing. Not a big deal, some beers ferment fast, just wanted to be sure it actually fermented rather than stalled.

Got down to 1.018. Sounds good to me. I expect a couple more points will be shaved off over the next couple of weeks.

The beer itself? Hot and harsh, surprisingly so. Characteristics I'd expect from a very young barleywine

Still way to early to tell how it will turn out, and historically I'm pretty bad at judging pre-carbonated, pre-conditioned beer. So we'll see. I had planned to lay this one down when it was a barleywine. May just end up doing that anyway. Expect I won't get a real taste of this one for another six weeks or so.