Botched First Batch

Well I decided to take the plunge into homebrewing with a starter brew kit and an IPA recipe package picked up from my LHBS. Basically what it consisted of was 6.6 lbs. pale LME, 3 oz. Cascade Hops, 1 lb. Crushed Victory and 8 oz. crushed Crystal 60L for steeping. I adjusted the hop schedule and boiling schedule a bit and used less Victory but I kept everything pretty much the same.

Here's what I ended up working with after adjustments:
hopville . "First Homebrew (IPA)" American IPA Recipe

I wanted to do a full boil, but since I didn't have a large enough pot I had to settle for a 3.5 gallon boil. Everything went great through the whole process, until it was time to pour the wort into the primary and pitch the yeast. I didn't account for evaporation loss, so I cooled the wort and added ~1 gallon of cool water then pitched the yeast and tucked it away to do it's work. It wasn't until I was checking the temp on the fermenter a day later that i noticed there was actually only about 3.25 gallon of beer in the fermenter. Like a noob I never checked to see how much wort I actually ended up with and just pitched without topping off with clean water for a full 5-gallon batch.

I guess basically I'm wondering how will this effect the end product? Essentially I used ingredients enough for a 5 gallons in a 3 gallon batch. Clearly I won't have an IPA anymore, maybe more like a Barleywine? BTW OG was 1.056 but I didn't know to take OG at ferment temp and the wort was at like 80-90*F when I took the OG. When I recalculate the recipe to the batch and boil size I actually used, it claims my OG should have been around 1.078.

Thanks for any help.

I guess you have a couple of choices. You can see how the beer tastes, and then decide what you want to do. You can either leave it as is, and have a barleywine (as you said) or you can decide to add water. If you add water to it, you want to boil the water (to remove oxygen) and cool it and add it to the beer without splashing. If you're planning on a secondary, you can put the boiled, cooled water into the receiving carboy and just rack the beer into it.

Either way, you'll have something tasty, I'm sure!

I agree with yoop, rack to a 2ndary that's got 1.5 gal of cool boiled water.

Ok so the options are:

1.) Add some water to the beer to get it up to a 5 gal batch when I put it into the secondary (which I hadn't planned to do but I am not opposed to it). I imagine this will result in a watery beer?

2.) Leave it "as is" in all it's concentrated glory and see what happens.

Thanks for the quick responses!

Lordsoth said:

Ok so the options are:

1.) Add some water to the beer to get it up to a 5 gal batch when I put it into the secondary (which I hadn't planned to do but I am not opposed to it). I imagine this will result in a watery beer?

2.) Leave it "as is" in all it's concentrated glory and see what happens.

Thanks for the quick responses!

Click to expand...

Well, it shouldn't result in a watery beer, if you end up with five gallons that was designed to be a five gallon batch.

It might be very "thick" if you leave as is, but either way is fine if you like it!

Well I think I'm just gonna leave this batch alone and RDWHAHB. That said, should I now start treating this like a Barleywine and change a few things accordingly, such as how long to age it and the amount of priming sugar to use? Anything else to consider?

Lol, well I don't know if it is physically possible to screw up more than I have with my first homebrew. Today I go to take a gravity reading, since it's been fermenting for one week and I don't see anymore yeasty activity. I open the primary up....yummy hop aroma! I put some in my gravity tube and it's sitting at 1.012. I taste it, tastes very good! Like an intense DIPA basically. This gets my hopes up! SO I put the lid back on and as I go to pop the airlock back in the hole the damn rubber grommet slips through into my beer! SOB! So I'm pretty much at a loss as to what to do at this point so I figure I can't screw things up any further and decided to rack it into a secondary bucket and I figure I may as well boil a 1.5 gallons of water and add that as you guys suggested. I know buckets aren't good for secondary due to all the airspace so I guess I will be bottling soon assuming I get the same gravity for a couple days in a row. What a mess! The only consolation is that my primary is now free to get another beer going, lol.

I did the EXACT same thing with my first brew.

I just added some boiled, then cooled water to the secondary before racking the beer from the primary.

My beer turned out GREAT.