A Series of Unfortunate Events

Two weeks ago i cooked up my first homebrew, which was an AHS English Ale kit. It's an extract kit. Unfortunately, as with all beginners i messed up (a little). I saw that tons of water had boiled off during the 60 minute boil. So i ended up adding a total of 6 gallons of water. The starting gravity of the beer was supposed to be 1.053. I got around 1.04. Unfortunately, since it was a pre-made kit i didn't have more extract to dump in and even things up. To make things more interesting, the beer spent the duration of the fermentation process without the cap on the airlock.

Last week i moved the beer from my primary carboy (6.8 gal) to the secondary. I used the auto-siphon fairly well and the process went much smoother than i thought. Then i choked off the transfer about 3 inches too early. I had at least an extra 1/2 gallon of beer in the primary and i just HAD to get it all. I couldn't restart the siphon because it was only a 2" layer. So i decided to basically take the carboy and dump it into a filter (pasta strainer w/paper towel). Then after all the crap was filtered i put it in a 1 gallon bluepoint jug and added some sugar. I gotta see if this carbonates!

Now it's two weeks after i messed up and created watery beer, i've tried it twice with my thief (hydro measurements) and as expected it has the flavor, but not enough. Kind of watery. The final gravity is supposed to be around 1.008. I now have a 1.018. So the 'beer' is like 2.5% alcohol.

My question is, after added corn sugar and bottle-conditioning, is there a possibility that the flavor will come out, or that the ABV will go up? Secondly, if the gravity ended higher than usual is the yeast ok?

I would just chalk it up to experience. The priming wil not raise the ABV but it may taste somewhat better with carbonation. If you have watery brew at this point it will not change to much.Sorry

I would say at 2.5% it's not going to taste too good.
You could buy some You can buy dme /lme and make up a wort to add to it.
I'd look at adding hops to the second batch of wort to help in the bitterness dept.

Do not bottle yet! Re-pitch without aerating and wait for it to come down.

david_42 said:

Do not bottle yet! Re-pitch without aerating and wait for it to come down.

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Interesting idea. Can i do this in the secondary carboy (5)? or do i need to put it back in my primary (6.8)?

You didn't boil off the extract, only the water. You added too much make up water, simple. I'm with Blender here but if you want you could put a hold on doing anything with that brew and brew another and mix with the first. I wouldn't do it but it is an option.