Headspace in 5 gallon carboy for 5 gal batch

I only have 5 gal. carboys. i make 5 gal batches. when i make a 5 gal extract batch, I boil ~3 gal, cool, put in carboy, then top off with cool, clean water. I just top off to within about 2-3 inches of the neck of the carboy. I want to get as much beer as possible.

Is this bad? It does not leave much headspace, I just use a blowoff tube into a half full gallon jug. after fermentation, there is a lot of "stuff" in the jug.

I guess my question is if the krausen is blowing through the tube into the jug, is that effecting my final product? (or, is too little headspace bad for the beer?)

sorry, no pics, but for reference, I have about half as much headspace as this person

You should be fine.. During blowoff (I use the same set-up) you are gonna lose some beer, depending on the degree of fermentation. During my most active fermentations, I never lost more than half a gallon.. And it's usually less than a 1/4 gallon.

I wouldn't worry about it. I get it all the time. You'll have some loss of volume due to the beer passing through the blow off tube but as long as you keep an eye on the water/beer in the blow off container so THAT doesn't overflow, you'll be fine.

As the others said, you're fine. My preference is to use a bigger primary, and a simple airlock, and since I have tons of headspace, I never get a blow off at all. It's fine either way, so don't worry about it!

that's what I figured. I just wanted to make sure whatever is blown out (krausen? yeast?) wasn't CRITICAL to my beer.

BTW, Groo, nice avatar. Haven't seen Groo in a LONGGGGG time.

are you calling me slow of mind?