6gal of water ended up as 4 gallons of wort...can i add now or too late?

All-

Just completed my first boil of an American Cream Ale recipe. I started with 6 gallons of water and 6lbs of LME, After the 60 minute boil, I ended up with just over 4Gal of wort in the fermentor. I didn't anticipate this much of a difference, and thus didn't have any top off water ready. It has been in the fermenter for about 1 hour. Can I still boil 1 gallon of water and let it cool and then add it back or is it too late? Recipe called for OG to be 1.042 to 1.046 and I was at 1.050. I am guessing I was high because of less liquid. What should I do now?

ED7

electricd7 said:

All-

Just completed my first boil of an American Cream Ale recipe. I started with 6 gallons of water and 6lbs of LME, After the 60 minute boil, I ended up with just over 4Gal of wort in the fermentor. I didn't anticipate this much of a difference, and thus didn't have any top off water ready. It has been in the fermenter for about 1 hour. Can I still boil 1 gallon of water and let it cool and then add it back or is it too late? Recipe called for OG to be 1.042 to 1.046 and I was at 1.050. I am guessing I was high because of less liquid. What should I do now?

ED7

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You can add water to it if you'd like. I don't boil and cool my water, but I have excellent tap water. I just use it "as is". If you have chlorine or something like that, you'd have to let it off-gas but boiling it probably isn't necessary unless you have a reason to need to boil your water.

So adding water to make up the difference is fine even after its been on the yeast for an hour or so? Just don't want to mess up my first batch

electricd7 said:

So adding water to make up the difference is fine even after its been on the yeast for an hour or so? Just don't want to mess up my first batch

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Sure, that's fine.

Yeah, add water for sure. If you have a grocery store nearby, I'd go buy a gallon of distilled or reverse osmosis water.

Make sure you mix the two. what you have is called a partial boil and is common. Shake the heck out of your primary for a solid 5-6 min.

Listen to the women with whips !

I topped to 5gal mark and agitated it pretty well. I've got airlock activity so I am hoping I am good. Thanks all!

Yooper, at what point is it safe to add water and what point isn't it? My intuition tells me adding it within a few hours of the pitching the yeast is fine (although have a slightly stronger beer is fine too) because fermentation really hasn't started in earnest, yet adding water the next day wouldn't be okay because fermentation likely has. But then I've heard others say it's okay to add even during fermentation. Is there a correct answer to this? Although I'm inclined to have a rule of thumb that once things start happening to stop mucking with it.

Okay, hijack over.

woozy said:

Yooper, at what point is it safe to add water and what point isn't it? My intuition tells me adding it within a few hours of the pitching the yeast is fine (although have a slightly stronger beer is fine too) because fermentation really hasn't started in earnest, yet adding water the next day wouldn't be okay because fermentation likely has. But then I've heard others say it's okay to add even during fermentation. Is there a correct answer to this? Although I'm inclined to have a rule of thumb that once things start happening to stop mucking with it.

Okay, hijack over.

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You can add water at any time. I've heard others say not to, but aside from introducing oxygen post-fermentation, there isn't any reason to not do it if the beer (or wine or cider, whatever) needs it. If fermentation is done, I would take greater care to not splash or aerate the beer when adding, so I would probably add the water to a fermenter, and then rack the beer into it once fermentation was complete or nearly so.

For wine, when I top up the carboy of a newly racked wine, I am very careful to not aerate/splash when I add the water. I very gently add it in a tiny stream to not aerate.

Thinking this through,I'm left wondering if dissolved o2 in the water used to top off with would have oxygenation effects on the beer? Or is it in practice not the same as splashing or other aeation effects? Maybe the amount of dissolved o2 in the water isn't enough to matter?

unionrdr said:

Thinking this through,I'm left wondering if dissolved o2 in the water used to top off with would have oxygenation effects on the beer? Or is it in practice not the same as splashing or other aeation effects? Maybe the amount of dissolved o2 in the water isn't enough to matter?

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Interesting question. I would imagine there's very little o2 in the water and what little there is dissipates very quickly. (you aren't pouring the water in at tap pressure after all). Also isn't the *fear* of oxidation a bit cautiously overstated? (I tend to think of it as akin to jaywalking; if you jay walk the odds of getting hit by a car are still less than your odds of not getting hit by a car but you're a real idiot for doing something that puts the odds into comparable range.) But I'll leave it to you and yooper who have the years of experience to hash out the practicalities.

Well,water being composed of 2 hydrogen atoms & one of oxygen,how much o2 could be concidered dissolved o2? Anyway,I've never had this problem arise personally. so I can't def say the water needs to be boiled to drive off dissolved o2. Without aerating the fermenting beer with the water addition,I tend to think it won't oxidize the beer with what o2 is dissolved in it at the moment of use.

If you we're shooting for a 5 gallon batch and ended up with 4 then basically you have condensed wort because extra water boiled off so it is no issue to add more water back to achieve the desired beer strength. Next time if your brew pot is big enough you could try starting with 7 gallons..if not it is just fine to top it off with water.

^^That's only part of the question. I've topped off with well chilled local spring water. But not after it's started fermenting,where o2 added can be a bad thing. We were debating if water that hasn't had the dissolved o2 driven off would be a bad thing at that point. Interesting question anyway...

To approach it mathematically... from this website, I see that

O2 dissolved in the Water at atmospheric pressure [at 77F/25C] can be calculated as:
co = (1 atm) 0.21 / (756.7 atm/(mol/litre)) (31.9988 g/mol)
= 0.0089 g/litre
~ 0.0089 g/kg

Shame on me for taking the Google shortcut instead of just doing the PV=nRT myself, right? Whatever.
Given that a gallon of water is roughly 3.8 kg, the amount of O2 added to the beer is .0267g.

O2 being roughly 32 g/mol, you can divide .0267/32 = .0008mol oxygen... not much, but I'm not sure at what concentration the O2 begins to have a noticeable oxidizing effect. There's the rub.