Add water to get desired OG? Do you do that?

[beauvafr]

Do you do that?

I ended up 1.096 instead of 1.084 for my Stone Sublimely clone. Wow. BIAB rules

Using WLP007 presuming 78% attenuation I will end 9.8% ABV instead of 8.6%.

I am not sure about this one.. Add water or not? Beer is already in primary, with yeast for about 2-3 hours. Also WLP007 could give me just 70%.

What do you think ?

 

[BreezyBrew]

That's a good question. I recently brewed this. Personally, I wouldn't, but maybe someone else has a reason. I've always heard toping up results in beer that isn't as good.

Mine came up a bit less bitter than I expected so I am dry hopping the heck out of it.

 

[Corey_SS]

WLP007 should handle 10% ok so I'd just leave it. Adding water is rarely a good idea in my opinion unless maybe you fell asleep during your boil.

 

[blizzard]

I typically do add top up water to get my desired OG. Mostly because I can hit my numbers and have more beer. You don't have to do that. White Labs says 007 will reach 80% attenuation even up to 10% abv. Sounds like you are going to have a high strength beer. That said, I don't think 2-3 hours in is too late to add water if you want to.

 

[ScottG58]

I have added water before fermentation with good rests. I would not do it post fermentation. I looked at it like adding water to extract when I could not boil five gallons. I also thought that if I overshot gravity a great deal, I would change the planned character of my beer.

 

[ArcLight]

I have a 5 gallon better bottle filled with good boiled and cooled water, just in case my boil is a little off or the efficiency was too good. Doing BIAB I occasionally get a much higher than expected OG.

 

[241]

Leave it as is, factor it into your starting water volume on the next batch. See if the yeast can attenuate out to the estimated FG. Learn from what happened instead of dumping water in.

Just my opinion.

 

[jlangfo5]

Just my own personal experience here, but I've added water post boil before to get my desired og and have had it turn out before.

You might want to have boiled the water first to make sure it clean though. Im just one point of reference though

 

[JohnSand]

I test before putting it in the fermenter and top off. I have also added water post ferment. My first grain batch was way stronger than I wanted. I bottled half as-is, the other half I diluted. Both were good. Boil the water first, or used bottled water. I wouldn't hesitate to add water to the fermenter, as you add many other things, like fruit, candy sugar, hops.

 

[MazdaMatt]

From personal experience there is nothing wrong with adding top-off water. I've done it at least a half-dozen times due to over-boiling and ending up too low on volume and too high on fermentables. A couple of my all-time favorite homebrews have been topped up with bottled water.

 

[zardozap]

Brewed a 3 Gallon Belgian Trippel SMaSH a couple of months ago, had a brain fart during batch priming and went over on the priming sugar by 1 & 1/2 oz. Wanting to avoid over carbonation in the bottles, I boiled about a gallon of water, and cooled it down to the beer temp and added it into the bottling bucket. Long story short, it ended up tasting more like a Dubbel, but the carbonation was just right. My wife ended up liking it, and she's picky about what she drinks.