Miss calculated efficiency, should I water down my brew?

Hey guys,

So on the weekend I brewed a recipe that I came up with using beersmith. From my previous batches using pre-milled grain from my LHBS, I was consistently getting efficiencies around 62-68%. However, only a store in Toronto had amarillo, warrior, and Simcoe hops that I need to try and make a DFH 60 minute clone, and apparently they don't mill for you!

So on the day I was going to brew, I opened to box to find un milled grain (I wasn't aware at this point). I panicked a bit but ran over to my buddies to grab his homemade mill (from a pasta roller - pretty cool). I continued on as usual, with the exception of milling my own grain. The crush was VERY fine, I'm surprised I didn't get a stuck sparge with my manifold. Needless to say, I wayyyy over shot my OG. the 65F wort had an 0G of 1.060, compared to the 1.045-1.049 I was expecting.

This increase in efficiency had to have been due to the crush, as all of my brewing procedures were the same, and the pre and post boil volumes were near to what I was expecting.

So here is the real question, should I boil up some water and dilute the batch? If so, should this be done after fermentation? I brewed on Saturday and there is no activity yet in the airlock, but I'm not worried about that yet. This was supposed to come in at around 5%, but is looking more like it'll be around 6.5%!

Here is the recipe:

8lbs 2-row Pale
2lbs Vienne

0.75oz hallertauer (60min)
0.75oz Saaz (15min)

1pkg safale 0-5

This probably sounds like an oversimplified crappy looking beer to some of you, but I was shooting for a 'german' blonde ale. This was my 4th AG batch and I was seeing what I could do by coming up with a recipe myself.

Let me know what you think!
Cheers,
Jay

I would pitch your yeast and let that bad boy sit. There is really no issue with overshooting your OG unless you were hoping for a lower ABV beer. Watering it down would be an extra step and more of a headache then if you just pitch it and enjoy it .

I would take this experience as a win and see how it comes out.

And don't knock simple beers, it's how you learn what each ingredient brings to the table. Some of the best beers out there were SMaSH beers (single malt, single hop).

I am betting you are going to end up with a delicious amber-type ale. Cheers!

Thanks VTrookie,


I had a dispute with my brewing buddy about this, and we both agreed it was a good thing, although it won't be exactly what we were looking for.

On the other hand, it's a homebrew, how bad can it really be? (Crosses fingers). Guess we'll just wait and see what the fermentation leaves us with!

Sometimes I add water, if hitting my OG is important to me. For some beers, it's not. But in this case, if I balanced the malt and hops and wanted a balanced beer, I probably would add a little water so that the beer is what I intended.