Forgot to add water (yes i'm an idiot)

Just got started brewing with a brew fest kit. Kit comes as a bag of wort (15 litres) and then you add 8 litres (2.16 US Gallons) of water to round out a batch. Only I added 2 litres instead.

Primary is complete and recognized my mistake tonight when i racked into carboy.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for any help.

what size is your carboy?? Too much headspace is supposedly conducive to promoting the likelihood of infection.
Also, I'm not sure whether or not you could get away with diluting to the proper volume with, either, bottled water, or water you've boiled and then cooled to the same temp as your beer, because I don't know if it would be possible to get the two different gravity liquids to mix evenly without risking oxygenating your brew.

Maybe possible to rack to your primary vessel onto the 6 litres of water and then rack the mix back into the carboy without doing too much damage.

Disclaimer: This is purely conjecture on my part and not something I have practical experience of.

Dump the water in. It's no more difficult than that. A bag of wort huh? Haven't heard of a kit like that.

If fermentation is done, you are probably better off just leaving it. The more you move it around and try to "fix" it, the more likely you are to infect it or oxidize it. It will be significantly stronger than it should be but that isn't necessarily bad. I've done a few wort-in-a-bag kits and kit&kilo kits and often the instructions have you watering it down too much and end up tasting weak. ...and if your tap water has chlorine in it, the less you put in, the better. But taste it and see what its like. You can always water it down later if you think it needs it. Do you have a hydrometer? What was the original and current gravity?

some pointers that I wish someone had told me when i started:
-get a no-rinse sanitizer like starsan and put it in a spray bottle.
-liquid yeast is worth the extra dollars
-always ferment below 20C/68F (with some exceptions)
-you don't really need to use a secondary
-don't compromise the quality of the entire batch to avoid wasting a few litres.

bottlebomber said:

Dump the water in. It's no more difficult than that. A bag of wort huh? Haven't heard of a kit like that.

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I forgot the name of it but yeah I have one in primary right now. Found it at a small winery in TN when we were down there for the race. Was on clearance for like $15 so I figured what they hey and gave it a shot.

Ogri said:

what size is your carboy?? Too much headspace is supposedly conducive to promoting the likelihood of infection.
Also, I'm not sure whether or not you could get away with diluting to the proper volume with, either, bottled water, or water you've boiled and then cooled to the same temp as your beer, because I don't know if it would be possible to get the two different gravity liquids to mix evenly without risking oxygenating your brew.

Maybe possible to rack to your primary vessel onto the 6 litres of water and then rack the mix back into the carboy without doing too much damage.

Disclaimer: This is purely conjecture on my part and not something I have practical experience of.

Click to expand...

Don't people do half batches in their carboys all the time?

J187 said:

Don't people do half batches in their carboys all the time?

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From what I've gathered, reading posts on here, it seems that if you made a half batch, kept it in the carboy as a primary and had plenty of CO2 sitting on top there wouldn't necessarily be a problem. Racking to a Carboy as secondary with a large amount of headspace and little to no CO2 blanket might be inviting the chance of some wild yeast or pollutant to join the party.

Having said that, I think I have read some posts that advised against doing a primary with too much headspace, but that might not have been fermenting in a Carboy.