Total Volume

Got to thinking today, the recipes i've followed so far have called for adding water until the "total volume" is a certain amount. With that thought, my fermenting volume has always been 5 gallons because i have a measure line on the bucket.

When the wort is boiling on the stove there are other things in there like DME, hops, whatever else. If i start with 2 gallons boiling, add the ingredients as called for, then follow the directions by interpreting "add water until total volume is 3.5 gallons (or whatever the recipe calls for, just a number here)" do i take into account that the other ingredients have added to the total volume? Or do i add another 1.5 gallons on top of the original 2 gallons to achieve 3.5 gallons?

Sorry for the rambling, it's just difficult to describe what i'm thinking right now.

Yeah I get what you are saying. Begin with the end in mind. You want 5 gallons of BEER? Then you are going to have to put more than 5 gallons into the fermenter as stuff will fall out of solution. That's why people shoot for 5.25 - 5.5 gallons in the fermenter. They know they are going to leave some of that behind in the end.

So it would appear my beer may have a stronger flavor than if i had used 5.5 gallons? At least a tiny amount?

ya know, that's a good question. a friend of mine and i brewed some beer this past weekend. my friend brewed an american stout that had 10 pounds of LME. his was a 7 gallon pre-boil. well 10 pounds of LME basically made his wort raise up a full gallon, so afterwards we added more water to get it up to 7 and thoroughly stirred until bringing to boil (it was a full-wort boil).

adding it to the fermenter, his OG was where it needed to be, around 1.075.

You aim for a total final volume. Your extract will add volume, and at the end you top up to the target volume. Sounds like that is what you've been doing. No worries!

Zixxer10R said:

So it would appear my beer may have a stronger flavor than if i had used 5.5 gallons? At least a tiny amount?

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Yeah a bit. That's what gravity reading are for. As long as they match up or are close, then there going to be very similar.

Some guys shoot for volume targets because they want a certain amount of beer. Other shoot for gravity targets as they are trying to nail a recipe and just deal with their volume. Not to toot my own horn because I make the same few beers over and over again but I normally hit both targets. Took some tweaking from batch to batch but I hit my numbers almost always.

I find it best to hit my gravity targets while shooting a bit high on volume. I don't mind leaving 1/2 gallon behind in the kettle with all the crap.

BendBrewer said:

Yeah a bit. That's what gravity reading are for. As long as they match up or are close, then there going to be very similar.

Some guys shoot for volume targets because they want a certain amount of beer. Other shoot for gravity targets as they are trying to nail a recipe and just deal with their volume. Not to toot my own horn because I make the same few beers over and over again but I normally hit both targets. Took some tweaking from batch to batch but I hit my numbers almost always.

I find it best to hit my gravity targets while shooting a bit high on volume. I don't mind leaving 1/2 gallon behind in the kettle with all the crap.

Click to expand...

So far i've hit 5 gallons exactly every time (only twice, but hey, that's still 100% ) That's because i'm only doing a partial boil right now. I have the power to do more but i'm still learning everything so i'm sticking to the recipe.

And I assume that you are hitting your gravity numbers too. So knowing what you know already if you bump up the volume a tad to 5.25 gallons, you could do a little bit of math to determine how much more extract to add to the recipe so that your OG stays on target.

It gets real fun doing this with All Grain batches.