Adding water to reach 5 gallon question.

I do a 3.5 gallon boil, my question is that when I add my extra water to the wort. Will it mix on it's own as well? Or will the water seperate from the wort. I shake the heck out of my carboy when I add the water but want to make sure this is enough.

It probably won't mix well enough to give you an accurate OG hyrdrometer reading, but as long as it's a little bit mixed from the beginning the yeast will churn it plenty during the fermentation.

I tought that was the case. I was just getting curious about it. Thatks alot for the quick response. My target was 1.054 and I ended up with 1.044. I thought that was not right. Is thier anyway to get a beter reading outside of a full boil?

You could take a sample (cooled) from the boiled wort, and scale the result based on how much make-up water you need. That should be fairly accurate.

For extract brewing, there's nothing wrong with taking the recipe and calculating your OG either. AG and PM you need to measure those, but that's due to the variability of your extraction.

If you ferment in a bucket, you can mix the wort and top off water quite easily by stirring vigorously with a sanitized long spoon for a couple of minutes. The problem is trying to find a suitable spoon. Wooden spoons are not suitable. SS spoons would be suitable, but could scratch the bucket leading to possible infections. Plastic spoons are good when they are new, but get scratched easily, and the scrathed areas can harbor infections.

-a.

I have a plastic wine thief that I use to stir up the wort. I also use it to get my sample for my hydrometer reading.

I have been thinking about getting this product called a Mix Stir:

http://www.homebrewery.com/wine/wine-brewpots-spoons.shtml

frazier said:

You could take a sample (cooled) from the boiled wort, and scale the result based on how much make-up water you need. That should be fairly accurate.

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+1 on this.

Shaking the wort should more than adequately mix the added water with the wort.

Take a gravity before and after adding the water just to see what happens next time! Adding a known amount of sugar to a known amount of water is easy but during a boil, time and size of brew kettle can vary the final volume of wort. If you start with 4 gallons you could end up with 3 even though the recipe says you'll end up with 3.5. If that makes any sense?

IMHO